The committee seeks to stimulate and facilitate wider usage of HPC across the private sector to propel productivity, innovation and competitiveness. Its goals include identifying private sector HPC applications needs and priorities, as well as outlining the workforce education and training needed to integrate HPC in the private sector.

"Understanding and overcoming the barriers to greater use of high-performance computing in industry, particularly at the scale required to drive innovation and the creation of new products and new jobs, is critical for our national competitiveness," Myers said. "I'm excited to be able to bring the experiences and lessons-learned from our public-private partnership and successful industry projects in New York into this important national discussion."

CCNI, in partnership with the Rensselaer Scientific Computation Research Center (SCOREC) and New York state's High Performance Computing Consortium (HPC2), works with New York state companies to develop and use massively parallel computational methods to support optimization of current products and the development of next-generation technologies. These partner companies include Xerox, ITT Gould Pumps, and Corning. CCNI and its partners provide expertise, training, and support in addition to computational resources to enable companies to effectively bring new capabilities to bear on their business-driven technical challenges.

The Council on Competitiveness is a non-partisan, non-governmental group of corporate CEOs, university presidents, and labor leaders working to ensure U.S. prosperity and enhanced U.S. competitiveness in the global economy. The organization generates innovative public policy solutions aimed at creating of high-value economic activity in the United States.

Rensselaer President Shirley Ann Jackson currently serves as university vice chair for the Council on Competitiveness, and is a member of the leadership council of the Council's United States Manufacturing Competitiveness Initiative.

The Rensselaer supercomputing center, CCNI, is a $100 million partnership between Rensselaer, IBM, and New York state. CCNI is among the world's most powerful university-based supercomputers, and is considered a top academic supercomputer center internationally. The center is committed to hastening the advance of ever-shrinking computer chips and other devices that are designed and manufactured by the micro- and nanoelectronics industry.

Computational resources at CCNI support at-scale modeling, simulation, and analysis in a broad spectrum of computational science and engineering disciplines. CCNI systems consist of massively parallel IBM Blue Gene supercomputers, POWER-based Linux clusters, and AMD Opteron processor-based clusters, together providing more than 100 teraflops of computing power.

CCNI partners closely with SCOREC and HPC2. SCOREC is focused on the development of the technologies necessary to enable multiscale systems engineering. The center endeavors to create reliable simulation technologies for engineers, scientists, medical professionals, and other practitioners. Key research areas for SCOREC include nanocomposites design and vascular disease modeling.

HPC2 is a partnership between NYSERNet and supercomputing centers at Rensselaer, Stony Brook University, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the University at Buffalo. Its goal is to increase New York state's competitiveness and foster economic development by providing industry and academic institutions with high-performance computing resources, including staff with expertise in modeling and simulation. The partnership, funded by the New York State Foundation for Science, Technology and Innovation (NYSTAR), often connects small and local businesses to leverage the computing power of CCNI.