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.