Unidata Abandons Planned Move to St. Cloud

The UPC will

After receiving clarification from the National Science Foundation, the Unidata Program Center has cancelled its plans to move its operations to the town of St. Cloud, Minnesota.

"We were a bit puzzled when we heard that the NSF wanted Unidata to focus its energies on moving to St. Cloud," says Unidata Program Director Mohan Ramamurthy. "Frankly, we were a bit worried about losing the high-speed Internet2 connectivity we enjoy at UCAR, but NSF is our primary sponsor, so we went along with it. And the proximity to St. Cloud State University would certainly be an asset to us."

After some puzzling interactions with NSF staff, it became clear that the NSF recommendation, which originated with the review panel for the Unidata program's recently approved five-year funding proposal, strongly encouraged the program to continue its efforts to move Unidata services to the cloud, not St. Cloud.

As a result, the Unidata Program will revive its original plans and refocus its efforts to bring geoscience data services and technologies to cloud-computing environments. Preparations to move the Program Center to the town of 65,000 roughly 65 miles northwest of Minneapolis-St. Paul have been cut short, and an appointment with the telephone installer (between 10am and 2pm, April 1st, 2014) has been cancelled.

"I must say I'm relieved," says Unidata Program Center systems administrator Mike Schmidt. "The logistics of moving the Unidata data hallway to a new location were really going to be tricky."