Big Data University


Rutgers and IBM team on a new High Performance Computing Center. 

Soon to be armed with a new IBMBlue Gene/P high performance computing center, Rutgers University will crunch big data from the life sciences to finance, and even do some climate modeling.
Partnering for analytics

RDI2 will be one of only eight of the nation’s 62 scientific computation centers with an industrial partnership programs.

The advisory committee for the center – Rutgers Discovery Informatics Institute (RDI2) – is already looking into providing higher fidelity climate modeling for the state.

Another example of the center’s potential use is the molecular modeling and data analysis of the influenza virus for better vaccine development. With the H5N1 avian flu and H1N1 swine flu co-circulating, health officials worldwide are concerned of a potential pandemic. RDI2 will provide scientists from Rutgers University, pharmaceutical companies in New Jersey, and IBM a way to model the influenza evolution pathways; predict the antigen-antibody bindings; and analyze the big data from both virus’ sequence databases and their structural conformations, from atomic level modeling.

High(est) Performance Computing in New Jersey

The Blue Gene system will deliver tens of Teraflops of compute power when completed. Rutgers expects RDI2 will house one of the most powerful academic supercomputers available for commercial use when fully built out – providing HPC resources via the cloud to Rutgers faculty members and regional organizations in need of better ways to analyze extremely large data sets.


RDI2 will not only work with private and public organizations, but also work train students in advanced analytics. As interest in and usage of the center grow, we also envision upgrading the hardware to Blue Gene/Q systems to offer hundreds of Teraflops of power. 

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