Rensselaer to Construct $100M Supercomputer

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute on Thursday announced that it is forming an alliance with the state of New York and IBM to construct the Computational Center for Nanotechnology, a $100 million supercomputer that will be one of the top 10 most powerful computers in the world, The New York Times reports.

The IBM Blue Gene computer will reside at Rensselaer’s Troy, N.Y., campus, and it will be able to perform 70 trillion calculations per second, according to the Times. IBM spokesman John Buscemi told the Times it would take a person with a calculator almost 60 million years to perform that number of calculations.

The supercomputer will be employed mainly for the production of semiconductor devices and nanotechnology research, the Times reports.

Shirley Ann Jackson, Rensselaer’s president, told the Times the state, IBM and Rensselaer will all contribute roughly $33 million to the project over the next half decade, and the computer is expected to be operational by the start of 2007.

Jackson also said that once completed, the computer will be the most powerful of its kind at any university in the world, according to the Times.

New York Sen. Joseph Bruno said the new center will attract more businesses to the area and lead to the formation of additional positions, according to the Times. Three hundred to 500 high-tech positions are expected to be formed as a result of the new center’s creation, Bruno told the Times.

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