New York State Business Outreach
The US Council on Competitiveness has identified high-performance computing as a key competitive factor for the future. "If we are to out-compete, we must out-compute."
As one of the Nation's leading high-performance computing, education, and interdisciplinary research centers, CAC is leveraged by New York State business and industry to stay on the cutting edge of computing, networking, and information technologies.
Helping New York Business to Innovate and Compete
How has CAC helped New York State industry innovate and compete? Let's look at a few examples.
Corning is heavily dependent on modeling and simulation
in the development of new product lines. CAC helped Corning understand the structure of glass at
the molecular level and the diffraction-limited optics in fused silica glass. CAC has also advised
Corning on advanced information technology architectures and, most recently, computational materials engineering.
CAC deployed IBM's first and largest SP supercomputer and was
IBM's product development partner. Today, CAC has helped performance test and deploy high-performance
computing cluster blades for IBM customers.
CAC reduced time-to-market for Kodak
digital printing products by parallelizing applications and using CAC supercomputers to reduce
compute time from weeks to hours. Kodak's CEO emphasized that Kodak is "strategically
positioned in the market for digital production color printing, which is growing at double-digit rates"
and is a $17 billion market.
CAC provided North Shore-LIJ Health System, New York State's
largest healthcare network, with training and consulting for systems and data management so that they could
deploy a state-of-the-art bioinformatics computing
and storage system for high-throughput genetic mapping. The
Biorepository at
The Feinstein
Institute for Medical Research supports many large scientific studies including the
New York Cancer Project with over 20,000
New Yorkers enrolled along with extensive medical and lifestyle information as well as blood samples for
genetic analysis. The goal is to understand genetic, socioeconomic, and lifestyle factors that account
for differences in cancer risk and outcome.
Northrop Grumman has teamed with Cornell,
Rochester's Impact Technologies, and others to win a $14.2 million award from DARPA to develop a Structural Integrity Prognosis System (SIPS) to predict when components will fail and reduce maintenance costs. Most recently, Northrop Grumman was awarded a $17.8 million two-year follow-on contract. The company's Bethpage, New York Advanced Capabilities Development group is developing SIPS.
Pfizer, the Nation's largest pharmaceutical firm with headquarters in New York, NY, is interested in emerging high-performance computing technologies and CAC information technology educational offerings.
TTC Technologies, Centereach, NY, is an example of the many small businesses CAC interacts with. TTC develops advanced software tools used by engineers for projects such as aircraft design, heat exchange analysis, and the development of hypersonic flows. CAC is providing TTC engineers access to high-performance computing systems to accelerate their product development and testing.
CAC is recognized nationally for its business outreach. For example, HPCwire selected CAC for its "Best Collaboration with Industry and Government Award." CAC was also honored to receive a Laureate Award from Computerworld and the Smithsonian for its advancement of cluster computing technologies.
Besides its expertise in advanced information technologies, CAC is Cornell's largest interdisciplinary research center and a gateway to industry collaborations in areas such as computational biology.
CAC, for example, is affiliated with OR-Manhattan and Cornell Operations Research and Industrial Engineering (ORIE). Their projects include working with Weill Cornell Medical College on a disaster planning system which is being developed in collaboration with Lockheed Martin and Intel.
Workforce Development
Cornell and CAC are sharing their intellectual capital by providing seminars, briefings, and training workshops to New York State companies. Over 100 companies have participated in CAC and Cornell events.
CAC collaborates with Cornell Computing and Information Science (CIS) which provides education in key fields and technologies in demand by New York State businesses, such as computational biology, computational science and engineering, and computer science. CAC staff teaches advanced information technology courses in areas such as high-performance computing platforms and tools and computational methods for nonlinear systems.
Cornell Computer Science and CIS have outstanding faculty and cutting-edge research. An example of a research project in New York State is the Cornell Information Assurance Institute, under the direction of Fred Schneider, which is affiliated with the Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, New York. IAI is focused on developing a science and technology base to enhance information assurance and networked systems trustworthiness. IAI corporate sponsors include Microsoft and Intel.
Another CIS research institute is the Intelligent Information Systems Institute under the direction of Carla P. Gomes. This institute performs research in compute- and data-intensive methods for intelligent decision making systems.
New York State Economic Development
Besides providing advanced information technology training and developing research collaborations with industry, CAC and the Cornell research community attract federal funding to New York State. For example:
- Cornell won a $2 million Next-Generation Cybertools award from the National Science Foundation to build cybertools that leverage the power of high-performance computing, the Internet, and Web services. Cybertools will allow for the manipulation, search, and processing of large-scale data in the Internet archive. Applications will include the study of social life in cyber space and practical business and government applications, such as the identification of market trends, the rise and fall of demand, and the spread of consumer opinion.
- Cornell was part of the Northrop Grumman led team that won a DARPA Structural Integrity Prognosis contract award that is now valued at $32 million.
- The National Science Foundation awarded Cornell $1.8 million to develop an information access and analysis system for data-intensive computing. Applications will include the rendering of computer-generated images. Steve Marschner received a Technical Achievement Award from the Academy Awards for developing techniques to simulate the subsurface scattering of light in translucent materials. These techniques were used in the "Lord of the Rings" and "Harry Potter." Total storage on this and other data projects will grow to more than a petabyte. Data will be housed and maintained by CAC and will be tightly coupled with the Center's high-performance computing complex.
The Vice Provost of Research at Cornell University contacted the Provosts of New York State's leading universities to encourage the creation of a state-wide computational "grid" which subsequently became "NYSgrid." The mission of NYSgrid is to create an advanced collaborative technological infrastructure that supports and enhances the research and educational missions of institutions in New York State.
Resources
New York economic development resources and associations that CAC is affiliated with include:
