Idaho’s House of Representatives has voted to approve $90 million in state bonds for the construction of two new buildings at the Idaho National Laboratory, a nuclear research and development facility.

The Cybercore Integration Center will serve as an R&D and education hub for cyber security, while the Collaborative Computing Center (C3) will feature a supercomputer for modeling and simulation workloads.

INL's Falcon supercomputer
INL’s Falcon supercomputer – INL'

That’s super

According to the Statement of Purpose document, Cybercore will be roughly 80,000 square feet (7,432 sq m), while the C3 will be roughly 67,000 square feet (6,224 sq m).

Including land acquisition costs, the estimated construction cost of the two facilities is $75 million. Idaho National Laboratory will then invest an extra $10m in improvements and IT equipment.

Construction is expected to begin in spring or early summer, with the project estimated to take fifteen months to completion. It should lead to about 1,000 temporary construction jobs, and 500 tech jobs in Idaho Falls.

While the state bonds resolution passed after a bipartisan 56-14 vote, the path to approval was not easy. Funding had previously been delayed to provide leverage for the House in negotiations with the Senate on issues of transportation and tax cuts, Post Register reports.

With the transportation package passing the House that same day, however, and the budget of the Department of Administration being held as a new hostage, the House’s leadership allowed the bill to get a floor vote.

“This collaboration is a tremendous opportunity for higher education in our state,” Rep. Wendy Horman, R-Idaho Falls, said.

The bill even attracted those of a more conservative bent, with Rep. Bryan Zollinger, R-Idaho Falls, saying: “This will probably be the only debt bill I will vote for in my entire legislative career.” It is his first term.

The state will own the buildings that INL will pay for and lease. INL is a Department of Energy lab managed by the private corporation Battelle, which also manages Brookhaven National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, among others.

The facilities will join an existing supercomputer at INL, the Falcon. It launched in 2014 as a 16,416-processor Silicon Graphics International supercomputer, but has since been upgraded.

Earlier the year, Falcon was recognized by TOP500 as one of the 500 most powerful commercially available computer systems. The updated version features more than 25,000 cores and 122 terabytes of memory housed in a 3,700 sq ft (344 sq m) data center.