Industry News

Sandia/California National Laboratories plans to begin construction on the Distributed Information Systems Laboratory in April 2002. The $35.5-million, 70,400-sf R&D facility will house 130 scientists from a variety of fields collaborating on improving nuclear weapons monitoring and testing, which is carried out by computer simulations. Dekker/Perich/Sabatini of Albuquerque, N.M., was awarded the $1,562,000 design contract for the project.

Sycamore Networks is proposing a new $120 million corporate campus in Tyngsborough. The eight-building, 926,500-sf project is planned to accommodate 661,500 sf for R&D housed in four buildings; a 200,000-sf corporate headquarters; a 50,000-sf center for customer care; a 10,000-sf daycare center; and a wellness center that will occupy 5,000 sf. Phase I construction is scheduled for completion in 2002, with full build-out in 2005. The associated parking areas, utilities, driveways, and drainage are included in the project.

Hyseq, a "dry" biotech firm in the Silicon Valley known for its computer modeling in the field of genomics, is building a new 139,000-sf wet lab in a converted office building near the company's Sunnyvale headquarters. The facility will be used to develop drugs and conduct biological testing. Completioin is scheduled for mid-2002.

Navy Marine Corps.' Intranet network operations center at North Island Naval Air Station in San Diego is nearing completion. A total of six such centers are planned for the network, with a second one to be built in Hawaii. The center project, which will link all Navy and Marine land facilities in the continental U.S., is headed by a consortium of private companies called the Information Strike Force, lead by Electronic Data Services Corp. of Plano, Texas.

XO Communications Inc. is considering the construction of a 300,000-sf building at a 40-acre site in Richardson to consolidate its 1,500 Dallas-area employees. The project would include a large regional training center as well as an 80,000-sf data center to accommodate Web hosting, server management, collocation, and related services. XO is working with The Staubach Co. on the potential consolidation.