Center for Computational Innovations

The Center for Computational Innovations (CCI) is solving problems for next-generation research through the use of massively parallel computation and data analytics. The center supports researchers, faculty, and students a diverse spectrum of disciplines. Industry collaborators include IBM, Boeing, GlobalFoundries, Intel, and Xerox.

A central feature of the CCI is the Artificial Intelligence Multiprocessing Optimized System (AiMOS), an eight petaflop IBM POWER9-equipped supercomputer configured to enable users to explore new AI applications.

Rensselaer's Center for Computational Innovations (CCI) is housed in a 22,000 square foot facility at the Rensselaer Technology Park.

Center Capabilities

Founded in 2007, CCI includes a 4,500 square foot machine room, offices and space for industry visitors. The CCI operates heterogeneous supercomputing systems consisting of massively parallel IBM DCS supercomputer and Intel Xeon processor-based clusters. The computational power of the current hardware configuration is rated at over 12 PF peak. These systems are supported by over a petabyte of disk storage. The CCI has dedicated high-speed connections to the main campus with up to 32 fiber lines available for growth as well as a direct connection to the NYSERNet optical infrastructure and Internet2 that provides access to the national and international high-speed networks.

IBM TrueNorth Neuromorphic Processor and Software Development Kit

CCI hosts the IBM TrueNorth neuromorphic processor and software development kit, a brain-like processor with 4,096 cores, each one simulating 256 programmable "neurons" for a total of just over 1M neurons. Each neuron has 256 programmable "synapses" that carry the signals between neurons. In total the chip has over 256M programmable synapses. The unique capability of this processor is its ability to process neural network programs in real-time (e.g., image classification computations) while consuming only 65 milliwatts of power, making it 10,000 times more power efficient than conventional von-Neumann processors. One of the central strengths of CCI is the flexibility in terms of how we engage with our industry partners, such as IBM. For example, export controlled and corporate confidential software is able to execute at the CCI.

CCI Computational Facilities Include:

  • "AiMOS" Super Computer: 14 racks (252 nodes, 130,000 cores, 1512 v100 GPUs) with 128 TB of RAM total.
    Debut at #24 on the Top 500 list
     
  • "AiMOSx" X86 / Nvidia GPU Cluster: 40 nodes, 2x20 Core Xeon processors with 8 v100 Nvidia GPUS and 768 GB of RAM each
    #469 on the Top 500 list
     
  • Medium-memory, Intel Xeon Cluster: 64 nodes, 16 Core Xeon processors with 256 GB of RAM each
     
  • EPYC Cluster: 14 nodes, 48 Core EPYC processors with 128 GB of RAM each
     
  • Parallel Storage: 11 petabytes disk storage IBM Spectrum Scale parallel file system
     
  • Network: Non-blocking 100Gbps/EDR Mellanox Infiniband switch fabric
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