The Center for Computational Innovations (CCI), (formerly the Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations) is a supercomputing center located at the

Rensselaer Technology Park The Rensselaer Technology Park is a technology park in North Greenbush, New York, USA (though with a mailing address in Troy) operated by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. As of 2009 the park has over 70 tenants representing a diverse range of te ...

Troy Troy ( el, Τροία and Latin: Troia, Hittite: 𒋫𒊒𒄿𒊭 ''Truwiša'') or Ilion ( el, Ίλιον and Latin: Ilium, Hittite: 𒃾𒇻𒊭 ''Wiluša'') was an ancient city located at Hisarlik in present-day Turkey, south-west of Ç ...

, New York.

Motivation

The center is the result of a $100 million collaboration between RPI, IBM, and

New York State New York, officially the State of New York, is a state in the Northeastern United States. It is often called New York State to distinguish it from its largest city, New York City. With a total area of , New York is the 27th-largest U.S. stat ...

to further nanotechnology innovations. The center's main focus is on reducing the cost associated with the development of nanoscale materials and devices, such as used in the

semiconductor A semiconductor is a material which has an electrical conductivity value falling between that of a conductor, such as copper, and an insulator, such as glass. Its resistivity falls as its temperature rises; metals behave in the opposite way. ...

industry. The university has also stated the center will also be used for interdisciplinary research in

biotechnology Biotechnology is the integration of natural sciences and engineering sciences in order to achieve the application of organisms, cells, parts thereof and molecular analogues for products and services. The term ''biotechnology'' was first used ...

medicine Medicine is the science and practice of caring for a patient, managing the diagnosis, prognosis, prevention, treatment, palliation of their injury or disease, and promoting their health. Medicine encompasses a variety of health care pr ...

energy In physics, energy (from Ancient Greek: ἐνέργεια, ''enérgeia'', “activity”) is the quantitative property that is transferred to a body or to a physical system, recognizable in the performance of work and in the form of hea ...

, and other fields.

Computer specs

At the release of the

TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non- distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coinci ...

supercomputer rankings in June 2010 the CCI was ranked the 80th most powerful supercomputer in the world, with a peak processing power of 91.75 Teraflops or 91.75 trillion floating point operations per second. When finished, all of the systems at the center will have a combined power surpassing 100 teraflops.

Hardware

The original supercomputer consisted of a series of IBM BlueGene/L systems which contain a total of 32,768 PowerPC 440 700 MHz processors. There is also a heterogeneous array of Power-based Linux machines and

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While it initially manufactur ...

Opteron processor-based clusters running on a common file system with the main supercomputer. Together, these systems created over 100 TeraFLOPS of computational power with associated high-speed networking and storage. In April 2013, the CCI Blue Gene/L was decommissioned and powered off. In August 2012, the CCI installed a 1 rack IBM Blue Gene/Q containing 16,384 A2 cores. The system was expanded to two racks (32,768 cores) in February 2013 placing at #76 on the June 2013 Top500 list. The system was expanded again to a total of 5 racks (81920 cores) by October 2013 when the new name of the system, AMOS, was announced. Capable of performing over 1.1 petaFLOPS, the 5 rack system placed #38 on the next Top500 list in November 2013. The CCI connects to the Rensselaer Troy campus and the

NYSERNet NYSERNet (New York State Education and Research Network) is a non-profit Internet Service Provider in New York State. It mainly provides Internet access to universities, colleges, museums, health care facilities, primary and secondary schools, and r ...

optical research infrastructure, enabling gigabit/second connections to the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

and

Internet2 Internet2 is a not-for-profit United States computer networking consortium led by members from the research and education communities, industry, and government. The Internet2 consortium administrative headquarters are located in Ann Arbor, Mi ...

National LambdaRail National LambdaRail (NLR) was a , high-speed national computer network owned and operated by the U.S. research and education community. In November 2011, the control of NLR was purchased from its university membership by a billionaire Patrick Soon ...

(NLR), and most of the research networks in the world through a peering point in Manhattan.

References

External links

*
Original Press ReleaseCCI Wiki
Supercomputer sites Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute {{super-compu-stub