ACADEMIA

James Myers, director of the Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations (CCNI) supercomputing facility at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, will speak about the future of American manufacturing today as part of a panel discussion at the second annual CGI America meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative.

Myers is a member of CGI America’s advanced manufacturing working group, titled Strengthening the Pipeline, which is tasked with developing solutions to “support ecosystems that attract and grow manufacturing companies through collaborative strategies, including national partnerships, regional clusters, urban initiatives, and new technology.” The meeting is taking place in Chicago.

CCNI is a $100 million partnership between Rensselaer, IBM, and New York state. The center houses one of the world’s most powerful university-based supercomputers and is a national leader in promoting the application of high-performance computing in industry. CCNI supports a network of more than 700 researchers in academia and industry across a diverse spectrum of disciplines in the Northeast and beyond.

“Digital manufacturing—using high performance computing to design advanced products and processes—is a critical competitive advantage for many U.S. companies. However, they represent only a small fraction of the estimated 300,000 manufacturers in our country. I am delighted to participate in CGI America and for the opportunity to share information about the successful public-private partnership model for industry engagement we’ve developed in New York to dramatically increase the number of companies taking advantage of high performance computing to grow their businesses. Our goal is to assure that digital techniques are a coherent part of regional advanced manufacturing strategies and are available at a scale that creates jobs and grows our economy,” Myers said.

Established in 2005 by President Bill Clinton, the Clinton Global Initiative convenes global leaders to create and implement innovative solutions to the world's most pressing challenges. To date CGI members have made more than 2,100 commitments, which are already improving the lives of nearly 400 million people in more than 180 countries. When fully funded and implemented, these commitments will be valued at $69.2 billion. Along with its Annual Meeting held each September in New York, the Clinton Global Initiative also convenes CGI America, a meeting devoted to economic recovery and job creation in the United States.

In partnership with the Rensselaer Scientific Computation Research Center (SCOREC) and New York state’s High Performance Computing Consortium (HPC²), CCNI works with New York state companies to develop and use massively parallel computational methods to support optimization of current products and the development of next-generation technologies. These partner companies include Xerox, ITT Goulds Pumps, and Corning. CCNI and its partners provide expertise, training, and support in addition to computational resources to enable companies to effectively bring new capabilities to bear on their business-driven technical challenges.

CCNI opened its doors in 2007 with more than 100 teraflops of computing power, and today supports a broad range of at-scale modeling, simulation, and analysis research across a spectrum of science and engineering disciplines. The center is committed to hastening the advance of ever-shrinking computer chips and other devices that are designed and manufactured by the micro- and nanoelectronics industry and to driving the academic and industrial adoption of computationally and data-intensive techniques. Over the last five years, more than 700 researchers from 50 universities, companies, and government laboratories have run high-performance science and engineering applications at CCNI.

Last year, Rensselaer won a $2.65 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to purchase, install, and run a new balanced, green supercomputing system at CCNI designed to support the development of next-generation computational and data-intensive applications. The new system is expected to be comprised of a powerful IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer along with a multiterabyte memory (RAM) storage accelerator, petascale disk storage, rendering cluster, and remote display wall systems. The new system will be a national resource for academic and industrial researchers across many different disciplines.

Myers is also a member of the High Performance Computing Advisory Committee of the U.S. Council on Competitiveness. The committee seeks to stimulate and facilitate wider usage of HPC across the private sector to propel productivity, innovation, and competitiveness. Its goals include identifying private sector HPC applications needs and priorities, as well as outlining the workforce education and training needed to integrate HPC in the private sector.

Prior to joining Rensselaer in 2010, Myers served as associate director for cyberenvironments at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. Before NCSA, Myers led the development of scientific “collaboratories” for research and education at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, serving as chief scientist for the Computational Sciences and Mathematics Division. He received a bachelor’s degree in physics from Cornell University, and his doctoral degree in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley.

For more information on CNNI at Rensselaer, visit:

Rensselaer Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations (CCNI)
http://www.rpi.edu/research/ccni/·      

GNS Healthcare Expands Membership at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Supercomputing Center To Advance Big Data Healthcare Solutions
http://news.rpi.edu/update.do?artcenterkey=3051

Innovating New Ways To Share and Preserve Scientific Data on Sustainability
http://news.rpi.edu/update.do?artcenterkey=2952

New Supercomputer To Boost Rensselaer Leadership in High-Performance Computing
http://www.rpi.edu/about/inside/issue/v5n14/supercomputer.html

Rensselaer Supercomputer Director Named to National Initiative on High Performance Computing
http://news.rpi.edu/update.do?artcenterkey=2872·      

Rensselaer Alumni Magazine: SuperPower
http://www.rpi.edu/magazine/fall2007/superpower-1.html