The Center for Computational Innovations (CCI), (formerly the Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations) is a
supercomputing
A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...
center located at the
Rensselaer Technology Park in
Troy,
New York
New York most commonly refers to:
* New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York
* New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States
New York may also refer to:
Film and television
* '' ...
.
Motivation
The center is the result of a $100 million collaboration between
RPI,
IBM, and
New York State to further
nanotechnology
Nanotechnology, also shortened to nanotech, is the use of matter on an atomic, molecular, and supramolecular scale for industrial purposes. The earliest, widespread description of nanotechnology referred to the particular technological goal o ...
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 industry. The university has also stated the center will also be used for interdisciplinary research in
biotechnology,
medicine,
energy, and other fields.
Computer specs
At the release of the
TOP500 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
In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate meas ...
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
Blue Gene is an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with low power consumption.
The project created three generations of supercomputers, Blue Gene/L, Blue Gene/P, ...
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 Opteron processor-based clusters running on a common file system with the main supercomputer. Together, these systems created over 100
TeraFLOPS
In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate meas ...
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
Blue Gene is an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with low power consumption.
The project created three generations of supercomputers, Blue Gene/L, Blue Gene/P, ...
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 and
Internet2,
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 computer networking, peering is a voluntary interconnection of administratively separate Internet networks for the purpose of exchanging traffic between the "down-stream" users of each network. Peering is settlement-free, also known as "bill-and ...
in Manhattan.
References
External links
*
Original Press ReleaseCCI Wiki
Supercomputer sites
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
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