Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations

The Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations (CCNI) is a supercomputing center located at the Rensselaer Technology park on the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute campus in Troy, New York.

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Motivation

The center is the result of a $100 Million collaboration between RPI, IBM, and New York State 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 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 2007 the CCNI was ranked the seventh most powerful supercomputer in the world, with a peak processing power of 91.75 Teraflops or 91.75 trillion floating point operations per second.^[1] When finished, all of the systems at the center will have a combined power surpassing 100 teraflops.

Hardware

The main supercomputer consists of a series of IBM BlueGene/L systems which contain a total of 32,768 PowerPC 440 700 MHz processors. In addition 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 will create over 100 TeraFLOPS of computational power with associated high-speed networking and storage. The CCNI connects to the Rensselaer Troy campus and the NYSERNet optical research infrastructure, enabling gigabit/second connections to the Internet and Internet2, National LambdaRail (NLR), and most of the research networks in the world through the peering point on 32 Avenue of the Americas.

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