Congressman Michael McMahon (D-NY) joined College of Staten Island (CSI) President Tomas Morales today in announcing two grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to provide new supercomputers that will support faculty research and provide enhanced educational opportunities for students.

The grants, totaling $1.3 million, will provide the capital infusion to expand the capacity and power of The City University of New York (CUNY)’s High-Performance Computing Center (HPCC) located on CSI‘s campus, and will serve researchers and students at CSI as well as throughout the University.

“I am thrilled that we have helped partner the federal government with our own CSI to support this important project. The great administration, faculty and staff at CSI have made Staten Island a first-class center for transportation research both here in New York and around the world,” says Congressman McMahon. “I look forward to working closely with CSI to support and enhance these important initiatives in the years ahead.”

CSI researchers are currently using the HPCC supercomputers for transportation analyses with the goal of reducing traffic congestion and energy consumption. These studies range from evaluating the impact of alternative transportation systems on commute times to issues of social equity in transportation routing.

CSI researchers are also using these systems to develop technologies required for more efficient and longer-life batteries.

“With the addition of these systems, the CUNY HPCC at CSI is without question, the largest, most capable academic research computing facility in the City of New York,” said Dr. Michael Kress, Vice President for Technology Systems at CSI, and Executive Director of the HPCC. “It is enabling us to recruit new researchers to CSI and to better prepare our students for their future careers in science, engineering, and mathematics.”

Kress added that these grants provide the foundation for the development and future construction of a Interdisciplinary High-Performance Computing Center, a 170,000 square foot research facility to be located at CSI and which is expected to attract computational scientists from around the globe to CSI and CUNY.

“Our goal is to provide innovative solutions for the computing needs of the research and student community,” commented Paul Muzio, the Director of the HPCC. Muzio added that these grants allow for the deployment of new supercomputers that incorporate significant advances in high-performance computing system architectures.

To enhance CSI’s research in the years ahead Congressman McMahon recently submitted an appropriations request for the FY 2011 budget that would provide $2.5 million to CSI to continue to bring together leading transportation experts, economists, social scientists, mathematicians, and computer scientists, to develop advanced methods for innovative analysis of critical issues in transportation.

Through this supercomputer lab, CSI is uniquely positioned to lead an innovative effort to develop the new advanced methods required for the analysis of large-scale transportation infrastructure systems, impact on the national and local economy, and related issues of sustainability and quality of life.
Muzio says that supercomputers produced over the last ten years have consisted of thousands or tens of thousands of microprocessors that are the same as those found in personal computers. These types of “parallel high-performance computers” enable researchers to process very large amounts of data across a very large number of processors. The new system, internally called “Andy,” is constructed and designed to provide substantially higher computational rates on processors coupled to “accelerators” as well as the ability to process, in parallel, very large amounts of data.

“Andy” is already installed and operational at the CUNY HPCC. This system, manufactured by Silicon Graphics International (SGI), is a hybrid system consisting of Intel microprocessors and the floating-point accelerators, also referred to as general-purpose graphics processing units, which are made by NVIDIA. The system was named after Andy Grove, an alumnus of CUNY’s City College and a founder of the Intel Corporation. The National Science Foundation and the City of New York jointly funded “Andy.”

Researchers at CUNY’s New York City College of Technology (City Tech) in Brooklyn are using the HPCC computers in Staten Island to develop more accurate models of the heart with the goal of developing improved treatments. Disease can degrade the electro-chemical signaling needed for the heart to properly function. By developing computer models that mimic these electro-chemical processes of the heart, City Tech researchers and their collaborators at the College of Physicians and Surgeon’s Department of Pharmacology at Columbia University hope to facilitate the design of new drugs to treat heart disease.

Researchers at CUNY’s Cooperative Remote Environment Sensor Technology Center (CREST), located at The City College of New York, use the systems to analyze air pollution over New York and along coastal areas.

A third grant in the amount of $500K came in from the City of New York through the efforts of Staten Island City Councilman James Oddo to further enhance the capabilities of the HPCC.

A second system with a different architecture, designed to support complex engineering applications, also funded by the National Science Foundation, is scheduled for installation in the Fall of 2010.