The Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations (CCNI), based on the Rensselaer campus and at the Rensselaer Technology Park in Troy, N.Y., is designed to continue advancing semiconductor technology to the nanoscale, while also enabling key nanotechnology innovations in the fields of energy, biotechnology, new materials, arts, and medicine.

CCNI provides a platform for researchers to perform a broad range of computational simulations, from the interactions between atoms and molecules up to the behavior of the complete device.

The result of a $100 million partnership involving Rensselaer, IBM, and New York state, CCNI was recently ranked seventh in the world, and it’s the most powerful of any system based exclusively at a university.

At the heart of the facility is an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer that will operate at more than 90 peak teraflops (trillion floating point operations per second). When fully operational, all of the components associated with the center will provide more than 100 teraflops of computing power in a heterogeneous computer architecture built on a common file system. That amounts to about 15,000 calculations each second for every person in the world.

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Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations Rensselaer Technology Park