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| Rochester Technology Campus | |
|---|---|
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| General information | |
| Status | Completed |
| Location | 3605 Highway 52 North,Rochester, Minnesota,United States |
| Coordinates | 44°03′30″N92°30′20″W / 44.05833°N 92.50556°W /44.05833; -92.50556 |
| Current tenants | IBM, Western Digital |
| Groundbreaking | 1956 |
| Inaugurated | September 30, 1958 |
| Owner | Industrial Realty Group |
| Technical details | |
| Floor count | 3 |
| Floor area | 3,100,000 sq ft (290,000 m2) |
| Grounds | 492 acres (200 hectares) |
| Other information | |
| Public transit access |  RPT |
| Website | |
| https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/rochester/rochester_intro.html | |
The Rochester Technology Campus is a facility shared by several companies inRochester, Minnesota. The initial structure was designed byEero Saarinen, who clad the structure inblue panels of varying hues after being inspired by theMinnesota sky[1] and the nickname of the first occupant,Big Blue.[2]
IBM's CEOThomas J. Watson Jr. reportedly chose the site of Rochester in honor of his copilot duringWorld War II, Leland Fiegel, who lived there.[3]Groundbreaking took place on July 31, 1956. When it was first completed, there was 576,000 square feet (53,500 m2) of floor space. After expansion, it has 3.1 million square feet (290×10^3 m2) on the main campus, more than half the size ofthe Pentagon inArlington, Virginia.
The building was first dedicated in 1958, but has been expanded considerably since then.
Employment at the site has gone through several cycles of growth and collapse, but is over twice what it was in the 1950s.
On May 4, 2016, it was announced that IBM would consolidate its remaining employees into the eight buildings on the east side of the complex and sell the remaining facilitates to a separate entity.[4] This occurred after years of IBM renting out its various facilities to companies it had spun or sold off such asHGST. The site's employee count (excluding contractors) was reported to be 2,740 in 2013 and 2,791 in 2017, a steep decline from the high of over 8,000.[5][6]
In February 2018 the property was sold to Industrial Realty Group of Los Angeles.[7]
On April 24, 2018, in a presentation to the local community, it was announced that the site was renamed Rochester Technology Campus.[8]
The mile-long facility is best known as the plant that produced the AS/400 computer system. The AS/400 system was itself an advancement of the System/38 that was introduced several years earlier with an inbuilt Relational Data Base Management System (RDBMS) making it leading edge for its time. The AS/400 was later rebranded as the iSeries. Development of the OS/400 operating system, now known asIBM i, continues at Rochester.
IBM Power Systems development is here.[9]
PureSystems were originally assembled at this site,[10] but are now mainly assembled in New York and Mexico.[11]
TheIBM 3740 Data Entry System was developed at the facility in 1973 and the follow-onIBM 5280 Distributed Data System had its beginnings there, but was transferred in 1981 to the Austin, TX facility, where it was released for production. The advent of personal computing swallowed up this type of data entry by 1990.
TheIBM 5110 personal computer was developed and manufactured in the facility.
IBM Rochester was important to theSummit andSierra supercomputers.[12][13]
RS/6000, nowSystem p, andhard disk development occurred here.
TheAS/400 division at the plant received theMalcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 1990. In November 2004, the facility claimed the top spot in theTOP500 list of fastsupercomputers with a prototypeBlue Gene/L system containing 32,768processors. It was clocked at 70.72teraflops. The manufacturing output of the site is so great that if it was a separate company, it would be the world's third-largest computer producer.
The plant, which is nearU.S. Highway 52 in the northwestern part of Rochester, was recognized in 1990 by theNational Building Museum as one of the significant contributions of IBM to the built environment of theUnited States, along with IBM'sNew York City headquarters and the IBMbuilding inAtlanta, Georgia.
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, although having been spun off from IBM Storage Technology, remains on-site, leasing otherwise unused space from IBM. Along with theMayo Clinic, the IBM plant is one of the biggest employers in the Rochester area, reportedly numbering around 5,000 in 2002.
In 2019, Crenlo LLC rented part of the IBM facility to move part of its EMCORE manufacturing division, where it is currently separate from the Crenlo Cab Manufacturing line of products, as EMCORE was sold in 2021.
Located eighty-five miles due south of the Twin Cities, Rochester is the home of both the Mayo Clinic and a major IBM facility housed in an Euro Saarinen edifice affectionately known as the Big Blue Zoo.
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