IBM, RPI, and New York Partner on Nanotech Center

Published: May 15, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server maker IBM, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the state of New York have announced a $100 million initiative to create a center for research on nanotechnology near the state's capitol. A new 70 teraflops Linux supercomputer built by IBM and donated to the Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations, will be housed in a relatively small 20,000 square foot facility on the RPI campus in Troy, New York, which is just north of Albany.

Like all state governments, New York has been looking to hitch its future tax revenues to any possible exploding business, and IBM is one of the state's largest employers--and certainly its richest and most famous. If IBM thinks nanotech is the next big thing, it is no surprise that George Pataki, New York's governor, and Joseph Bruno, state senate majority leader who holds the purse strings, are enthusiastic about nanotech and are willing to pony up one-third of that $100 million seed money to create the CCNI. The fact that the nanotechnology research that the center will be performing is directly related to the chip business--at least initially--is no coincidence, either. RPI is willing to put up its $33 million share of the investment because it is older than the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the king of the tech schools in the United States but not the oldest, and it wants to get a piece of its vast research budget. (It's like a Yankees-Red Sox rivalry, but for more than a century, the Red Sox have been winning almost all of the time.) RPI was not a big center for computer science in the early days, like the Lincoln Labs was at MIT (which spawned, among other things, Digital Equipment), but this time RPI is learning from history and getting in on the ground floor.

Interestingly, chip maker Advanced Micro Devices, which has been working with IBM on perfecting future chip-making technologies, and Cadence Design Systems, which creates electronic design automation software and which is now run by former general manager of server chips at Intel, Mike Fister, are the first two companies to sign up to do work at the center. IBM and AMD have already been working on pushing IBM's silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technologies to smaller and smaller dimensions in facilities on IBM's East Fishkill campus and in another facility in Albany. The industry is trying to shrink circuits to 45 nanometers by 2009, 35 nanometers by 2012, and 22 nanometers by 2015, and this is going to take a lot of simulation and rejiggering of manufacturing processes and the software that goes into designing such small chip circuits. Sources at IBM say that CCNI expects many different kinds of nanotech companies to use the facility.

The central feature of the facility is hybrid Linux cluster rated at an aggregate of 70 teraflops of computing capacity, which will be comprised mostly of 10 to 12 racks of massively parallel BlueGene/L machines. The cluster will also have some IBM eServer 326 Opteron-based servers, but IBM says that these will represent only a fraction of the computing capacity. The center is expected to be running by the end of the year.