Some 66,000 square feet of textured carpet, plush offices and windows sheer enough to resemble invisible walls nearly took a back seat Thursday to the man credited with funding those amenities inside the newest building at U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center.

A packed conference room inside the new, 66,000 square-foot Information Technology Laboratory gave U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran a standing ovation before and after his comments touting how the new center will contribute to national security.

“It literally took an act of Congress to build this building,” ERDC director Dr. Jeffrey Holland said. “The senator and his office made that possible.”

State-of-the-art was a recurring theme as Cochran and top military and civilian brass at ERDC dedicated the building and inked a charter with Mississippi State University establishing a unique research partnership inside the lab.

“Your leading research and development efforts to protect our soldiers, our citizens and our critical national infrastructure,” Cochran said during a program to dedicate the $16.8 million structure.

Inside the lab are a 300-foot conference center that can be divided into three separate rooms, a small-group work area, 102 separate private offices and 10,000 square feet of raised floor computing space.

“It’s impressive that of the five Department of Defense supercomputing centers, two are in Mississippi,” Cochran said. The other is at Stennis Space Center on the Gulf Coast.

Partnering with MSU on the Institute for Systems Engineering Research is intended to cut costs and time of an array of research projects for both the Department of Defense and the university.

“We’re pleased to see the partnerships established with Mississippi’s research universities,” Cochran said.

Holland combined research with college football when describing the partnership during the dedication.

“If you don’t beat Kentucky, we’ll have to give this back,” Holland matter-of-factly told MSU president Dr. Mark Keenum during the address.

Wide-ranging research in the battlefield, on rivers, after natural disasters and more will be housed in a facility geared to follow the dollar, Holland said.

“About 50 percent of all the work ERDC does today, $1.1 billion in funding we had in FY 15, is computational,” Holland said. “And that work has to be served by someone. So, in very real sense, this facility and the people who work in it are involved in the future of the organization.”

ITL is the second multimillion-dollar edifice built at the Army’s Halls Ferry Road complex since 2011. That year, a $16.4 million administrative office complex for the Environmental Laboratory was completed.

ERDC, the premier research and development center for the Corps, claims a research program of more than $1.3 billion and $1.2 billion in facilities.