NYSTAR awards $3M to establish 'Supercomputing Consortium'

Provides hands on assistance to New York State businesses and academia: The New York State Foundation for Science, Technology and Innovation (NYSTAR) today announced the awarding of a $3 million grant over three years from its Center for Advanced Technology Development Program to establish the High Performance Computation Consortium (HPC2). The consortium consists of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Stony Brook University, the University at Buffalo and the New York State Education and Research Network (NYSERNet). Other institutions that will be working with the consortium include Cornell University, Columbia University, New York University, the University at Rochester, the Rochester Institute of Technology, the City University of New York and any other research institution across the state that is undertaken data-intensive research. The consortium will provide hands on assistance, through their scientists and engineers to the broader New York State user community, both to ease access to supercomputing resources at the institutions and to guide users in the utilization of HPC. This award will allow for the computational scientists hosted in one of three centers, to be deployed to any location in the state to provide assistance in the use of the HPC assets to businesses and academic users. NYSTAR's Centers for Advanced Technology (CATs) perform research in such areas as optics, energy, nanotechnology, biotechnology, telecommunications, material sciences, information technology, environmental sciences, and economic and social sciences. They will now be able to enhance their research efforts with their industrial partners through access to high performance computers. The targeted services to be delivered will be CAT-centered projects and will encompass some of the following areas:

• Application Support: HPC2 computational scientists will directly support simulation-based engineering science at the CATs. This includes helping port existing software applications to run effectively on HPC2 resources as well assistance in the development of new algorithms to facilitate the CATs ability to utilize SBES in their research.
• Education, Outreach, and Training: HPC2 will develop, maintain, and host a resource/knowledgebase for HPC/SBES oriented towards this initiative, which will also serve as a repository for supporting tools and monitoring. This will contain application software, project specific information, tutorials and other training materials. HPC2 will also provide on-site workshops and training for CAT researchers.