GOVERNMENT
Rensselaer celebrates grand opening of world-class supercomputing center
- The Honorable Shirley Ann Jackson, Ph.D. (Moderator) President, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
- The Honorable John H. Marburger III, Ph.D. Science Adviser to the President, Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy
- The Honorable Arden L. Bement Jr., Ph.D. Director, National Science Foundation
- John E. Kelly III, Ph.D., Class of 1978 Senior Vice President & Director of Research, IBM Corporation
- Charles M. Vest, Ph.D. President, National Academy of Engineering
CCNI is designed to continue advancing semiconductor technology to the nanoscale, while also enabling key nanotechnology innovations in the fields of energy, biotechnology, new materials, arts, and medicine. CCNI will provide a platform for researchers to perform a broad range of computational simulations, from the interactions between atoms and molecules up to the behavior of the complete device. The center will be an important resource for companies of any size — from start-ups to established firms — to perform research that would be impossible without both the computing power and the expert researchers at CCNI. As part of the CCNI grand-opening celebration, Rensselaer also hosted a two-day National Science Foundation symposium Sept. 5 and 6. The event featured technical presentations by scientists and engineers addressing the complexity of the interactions of cyber and physical worlds. Arden L. Bement Jr., director of the National Science Foundation, delivered the capstone address at dinner on Sept. 6. Under Bement’s leadership, NSF recently launched the Cyber-enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI) initiative — a five-year program designed to explore radically new concepts, approaches, and tools at the intersection of computational and physical or biological worlds. Up to 300 high technology jobs are expected to be created directly as a result of the establishment of CCNI. Along with expanding the intellectual vibrancy of New York’s Capital Region, the supercomputing center also is expected to attract dozens of new computation-based startup companies, along with small, medium, and large corporations, which could add to the number of high-paying technology jobs in the region. Cadence Design Systems, a leader in electronic design automation software, and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), a global supplier of integrated circuits for personal and networked computing and communications, intend to collaborate with Rensselaer and IBM through CCNI in advanced simulation and modeling of nanoelectronic devices and circuitry. The funding for the project was coordinated by and will be administered through the Empire State Development Corporation. The CCNI system is made up of massively parallel Blue Gene supercomputers, POWER-based Linux clusters, and AMD Opteron processor-based clusters, providing more than 100 teraflops of computing power. A Web cast of the Sept. 7 colloquy will be archived online. More information is available at: its Web site. For more information about CCNI, go to: its Web site. For more information about IBM’s Blue Gene, go to: its Web site.