Nanotechnology Gets Bigger, Faster

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in collaboration with IBM and New York state, has announced a $100 million partnership to create the Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations (CCNI), supposedly the world’s most powerful university-based supercomputing center.

The CCNI system will be made up of massively parallel Blue Gene supercomputers, POWER-based Linux clusters, and AMD Opteron processor-based clusters, providing more than 70 teraflops of computing muscle.

CCNI will focus on reducing the time and costs associated with designing and manufacturing nanoscale materials, devices, and systems. Designing and manufacturing smaller, cheaper, and faster semiconductor devices is crucial to sustaining Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors per a given area doubles roughly every 18 months. Chip designers and manufacturers have sustained Moore’s prediction by continually shrinking the size of devices on semiconductor chips. Today’s circuit components measure about 65 nanometers (nm) in width, or 65 billionths of a meter. According to the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, this needs to shrink to 45 nm by 2009, 35 nm by 2012, and 22 nm by 2015.

The center will be a resource for companies of any size--from start-ups to established firms. The computing power also will benefit faculty and student research projects at Rensselaer, such as in biocomputation, which involves the modeling and simulation of tissue, cell, and genetic behavior.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 10:09 AM  Permalink