Capable of performing more than one quadrillion (1015) calculations per second, the AMOS (Advanced Multiprocessing Optimised System) five-rack IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer has been deployed at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the US.
In addition to its computational power, AMOS has high-performance networking capabilities with a bandwidth of more than four terabytes per second. It is the most powerful university-based supercomputer in New York state and the Northeast, and among the most powerful in the world.
‘If every person in the world performed one simple mathematical calculation per second continuously without sleep or any breaks, it would take the whole of humanity nearly two days to compute what AMOS could do in a single second,’ said Christopher Carothers, director of CCI and a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Rensselaer. ‘It is such an exciting time to be at Rensselaer. By entering the petascale with AMOS, we are better positioned than ever before to change the world.’
AMOS is part of the Rensselaer Institute for Data Exploration and Applications (The Rensselaer IDEA), which serves as a hub for Rensselaer faculty, staff, and students engaged in data-driven discovery and innovation. Working across disciplines and sectors, The Rensselaer IDEA empowers students and researchers with new tools and technologies to access, aggregate, and analyse data from multiple sources and in multiple formats. It connects three of the university’s critical research platforms: the CCI supercomputing centre, which houses AMOS and an IBM Watson cognitive computing system dubbed Watson at Rensselaer; the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center; and the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies.
