What separates community with fast-track potential from a place that doesn’t have these prospects? In the last couple of centuries, access to physical portals and transport connections was highly material. Places that had access to the ocean, to major rivers and waterways, land for industrial and residential use, highways etc. had a cat/bird shot at getting big and staying that way.
Tulsa’s prospects for additional high-wage jobs and access to emerging markets has been, and continues to be, tightly connected to these assets — but there are also other factors at play. Economic historian Nail Ferguson and science writer/polymath Steven Johnson have modified this long offered notion in recent books by noting the supreme import of density (cities), intellectual property rules and the surprising importance of professional/amateur societies, informal spots like high brow coffee shops/bars, and royal/public money for early stage projects and frankly experimental efforts.
In our new century, a powerful advantage springs from having a bunch of brainy folks and a highly tolerant culture that values idiosyncratic individuals and their lifestyles. Over the course of the last several months I’ve written several pieces on developments associated with a signal community supercomputing project here in Tulsa. A supercomputer is an extremely high performance computation engine, or an array of lots of conventional processing devices ganged together as a seamless, ultra-capable gizmo. Another way of thinking about a super: they are simply the fastest, most capable computing machines available at any given time. Supers have been used traditionally for nuclear weapons simulation, seismic exploration, particle physics, aerospace prototyping and climate modeling.
Having a publicly available “Super” could give Tulsa researchers/scientists, designers, engineers, entrepreneurs and artists a wild-card advantage in our region. Barry Davis, a veteran Tulsa venture capitalist and David Greer, the chief of TU’s nationally renowned information security technology program and the acting director […]
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