BOULDER - The National Center for Atmospheric Research announced Tuesday that it will form a partnership with the University of Wyoming and the state of Wyoming to build a new supercomputing data center for scientific research in Cheyenne.

The center will house some of the world's most powerful supercomputers working to advance understanding of climate, weather, and other Earth and atmospheric processes.

During its nearly year-long decision process, NCAR had considered partnerships with several universities along the Front Range, with UW and the University of Colorado in Boulder receiving particularly close scrutiny. In the end, NCAR chose to locate its new center in Wyoming after concluding that a partnership with Wyoming would get the greatest computing capability for the regional and national scientific community at the earliest possible time, according to a press release from NCAR.

The new partnership is contingent on approval from the National Science Foundation, which is NCAR's principal sponsor, as well as from the Wyoming legislature.

Construction of the $60 million data center will begin this year, once funding and other approvals are completed. The center will open in late 2010 or early 2011, and generate new collaborations between NCAR, UW, CU, other Front Range institutions and the rest of the research community.

The center's supercomputers, which will be upgraded regularly, will initially achieve speeds of hundreds of teraflops (trillion floating-point operations per second).