Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovation
John E. Kolb, PE, Chief Information Officer, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in collaboration with IBM and New York State, has begun deployment of one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, to help continue the impressive advances in shrinking device dimensions seen by electronics manufacturers, and to extend this model to a wide array of industries that could benefit from nanotechnology. The CCNI will focus on reducing the time and costs associated with designing and manufacturing nanoscale materials, devices, and systems. CCNI represents a convergence of academic and industrial expertise with massive computing capability linked to the world via the NYSERNet network.
Based on the Rensselaer campus and at its Rensselaer Technology Park in Troy, NY, the CCNI will operate heterogeneous supercomputing systems consisting of massively-parallel Blue Gene supercomputers, Power-based Linux clusters, and AMD Opteron processor-based clusters. This initial heterogeneous hardware and software configuration is expected to provide approximately 100 TeraFLOPS (that is, at least 100 trillion sustained floating point operations per second) peak performance. When the facility comes on line this spring, it is expected to be the world’s most powerful university-based supercomputing center, and one of the top 10 supercomputing centers of any kind in the world.
The supercomputer, being installed in Rensselaer Technology Park, will be housed in a 25,000 square foot facility including a 6,500 square foot machine room space with power, cooling, and backup to support this powerful computing engine. The CCNI building will also hold almost one petabyte of storage for calculations currently underway, output of calculations, and queued data for imminent runs. The facility also includes offices that can be used on a rotational basis for partner activities as well as space for systems operators and support personnel.
“For the past forty years computer processors have enjoyed the phenomenal exponential growth known as Moore’s Law:, notes John E. Kolb, P.E., Renssealer’s Chief Information Officer, “where the number of processors on a chip double roughly every eighteen months. But the challenges for continuing that growth in the current nanoscale manufacturing environment and overcoming quantum theoretic limits are daunting. CCNI will enable the complex calculations necessary to design and model that next generation of nanoscale electronics.” A leading faculty researcher, Dr. Mark S. Shephard echoed this perspective: “Whole new classes of nanoscale modeling problems of critical importance to scientists worldwide are now within reach. Exploiting the simulation and modeling capabilities of the Rensselaer faculty with this extraordinary tool will allow us to push the envelope on computationally based scientific exploration. I anticipate each calculation opening up new, more computationally sophisticated models to understand.”
Like the Rensselaer campus, the CCNI computer is linked to the NYSERNet optical infrastructure and, through that, to NYSERNet’s international peering point in New York City. “Building on John’s and Mark’s comments,” says Dr. Timothy Lance, President and Chair of NYSERNet, “I expect both the computational complexity of and data transfer requirements for CCNI problems will rapidly grow with each calculation. That data can be transferred very rapidly, including on 10 gigabit per second waves within New York and to the world through our peering point in Manhattan makes this a global resource of inestimable value.”
The CCNI will cultivate a broad partnership of university, industry, and government organizations focused on the development and application of new generations of simulation technologies on world-class super computers. The founding partners of CCNI – Rensselaer, IBM, and New York State – welcome multiple levels of partners from startups to major corporations, government laboratories, and universities interested in the development and application of computational nanotechnologies. Nanotechnology focused industries joining the program include: semiconductor manufacturers, systems integrators, equipment makers, software providers, and materials manufacturers. The CCNI, coupled with the excellence in the NY state Capital Region in semiconductor fabrication technology will provide industry a total solution, from simulations to physical device fabrication.
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