Barn Completed and Open for Business

The reconstruction of the historic Dutch barn that has resided in the Tech Park for over 200 years has been completed this past summer.  The Barn has been rebuilt in its original location utilizing the bulk of the structural timbers that defined its classic “H-framed” structure going back to the settlement of the Defreest family in the mid 1700’s.
While preserving the character of this early Dutch homestead, it will now serve a 21st century purpose in the Tech Park as a multipurpose center for seminars, training sessions, planning retreats, receptions and a broad array of special events. 
To find out more about the Barn and its availability contact April Rounds at 518.283.7102 or rounda@rpi.edu.

Fall in the Park

Expansion for Treo Solutions Under Construction

Treo Solutions is more than doubling their size by constructing two additional facilities adjacent to their existing 8,000 square foot building in order to accommodate their recent and anticipated future growth. The layout and design of the two new facilities are intended to reflect the unique culture of their company and the cross discipline teamwork needed to provide customer focused services to their clients. The new buildings will reflect the architecture and scale of their existing building which will sweep across the knoll at 125 Defreest Drive and all three will be connected by enclosed breezeways. The buildings on each end will be office space and the middle building for web based client meetings, company provided meals and team meetings. Treo Solutions is a healthcare information services company that helps clients develop and implement actionable performance improvement strategies through the use of information. Treo’s revenue has quadrupled in the three fiscal years between 2005 and 2008 and staffing has been growing as well. Founder and CEO Bill Kelly, a graduate of RPI, stresses team building and camaraderie…”culture cannot be something you simply cultivate in staff meetings”…and is looking foward to the new space to enable that client and team first atmosphere.

GE Healthcare Grand Opening

On Friday, June 5 senior leaders from GE Healthcare and GE Global Research joined State and local leaders as well as officials from RPI for the grand opening of GE Healthcare’s new, state-of-the-art digital mammography production facility at the Tech Park.  The new 230,000 sq ft facility will add 150 high paying jobs in Rensselaer County with an annual payroll of $10 million.  Investment in the new facility totals over $165 million.  With a focus on “Clean Technologies”, the building has achieved USGBC LEED Gold Certification, making it one of only two semiconductor manufacturing facilities in the US to achieve this status.  The construction of the new facility will enable GE Healthcare to meet the growing demand in the market for digital X-ray products used in mammography for breast cancer screening and diagnosis

Park Hosts Robotics Demonstration

On Saturday, February 14 more than 200 high school students competed on seven teams in the Tech Valley FIRST Robotics Showcase Exhibition which took place in the RPI Tech Park for the second year.  The Exhibition was sponsored by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Chief Executives Network (CEN).  Teams were challenged to create a robot that could pull a trailer and maneuver spherical objects with the goal of placing as many spheres in the opponents trailer as possible before the end of the round.  They were given six weeks to create their robots.  This Showcase Exhibition serves as practice for upcoming regional and national competitions.

Supercomputer for Cutting Edge Research and Development Available to New York State

The New York State Office of the Chief Information Officer and Office for Technology (CIO/OFT) and the New York State Foundation for Science, Technology and Innovation (NYSTAR) announced that public and private researchers and businesses in New York State have nearly 150 million CPU hours on one of the world's most powerful supercomputers. Over the next three years, businesses, universities and state agencies can apply for time on the supercomputer located at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Computation Center for Nanotechnology Innovations (CCNI).

"The ability to perform cutting-edge research at a fast pace is crucial to the continued development of new products and technology across our state," said Governor Paterson. "The supercomputer is an invaluable resource for our local businesses and universities. I applaud CIO/OFT, NYSTAR and Rensselaer Polytechnic for working with public and private researchers across the State to take advantage of this significant technology."

The global market is becoming increasingly competitive and the State's HPC assets can help differentiate New York firms from the rest of the world by increasing the speed in which they can innovate," said Ed Reinfurt, Executive Director of NYSTAR. Fortune 500 companies along with many smaller companies have expressed extreme interest in using this supercomputing facility to assist them in product development and help them gain a competitive advantage by decreasing their time to market for their new products.

The CCNI has been fully operational for less than one year and already has some key businesses using it. Gene Network Sciences, (GNS) based out of Ithaca, NY, is using the CCNI to develop and test their proprietary applications which are used to weed through enormous amounts of data in genomic research. Cadence Design Systems, a leader in electronic design automation software, is using the massive computational power of the CCNI to perform advanced simulations in chip design as well as research technologies that will be used to develop chips in the future.

"The world is taking notice of the emergence of supercomputers in New York and our state's burgeoning high-tech economy," said Dr. Melodie Mayberry-Stewart. "the research and development that takes place on this high-powered computer will have significant implications for medical, agricultural, economic, social programs and public policies. State agencies will be able to use the supercomputer to solve complex problems in public safety, cyber security, education, transportation, health or human services to name just a few - and at no cost. Through this historic partnership with NYSTAR, Rensselaer and IBM, New York will be at the forefront of innovation."

Supercomputers are playing an increasingly important role in scientific and business research by allowing researchers to create more accurate models of complex processes, simulate problems once thought impossible to solve, and analyze increasing amounts of data generated by experiments. Supercomputers allow cutting-edge research and design to be preformed in weeks or months, rather than years using conventional computers.
"CCNI is a wonderful example of how collaboration and joint investments between higher education, government and industry are building an innovation economy in New York. CCNI will hasten scientific advances by extending human insight and discovery through the use of supercomputing technologies," said Dr. john E. Kelly III, senior vice president and director of research at IBM.

The CCNI increases the technological capacity of academic, public sector, and private sector research in New York. NYSTAR, in partnership with CIO/OFT, will leverage this asset to propel New York forward in areas using computer modeling and simulation. This supercomputer, along with advanced academic cyber-infrastructure, will allow researchers anywhere in New York to participate in this unique opportunity, making this truly a statewide initiative.

"The ability to create and run massive, data-rich models and simulations is crucial for advancing countless academic pursuits and industrial endeavors - from developing new advanced materials to understanding in more detail the physical and life sciences - and is growing more critical every year," said John E. Kolb, vice president for information services and technology and chief information officer at Rensselaer. "CCNI and other supercomputations, which in turn is accelerating innovation across all spectrums of research and product development."

New York State invested in a $100 million partnership with Rensselaer and IBM to create one of the world's most powerful university-based supercomputer centers. As part of New York's investment in the CCNI, the state was allocated 20% usage of the supercomputer. This partnership is unlike any other in the nation. The State has adopted a usage policy which gives preference to economic development but also includes use for state agencies to conduct research.

At the heart of the CCNI facility is an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer that will operate at more than 80 teraflops (trillion floating point operations per second). At peak performance, CCNI packs 100 teraflops of massively-parallel computing power, meaning the supercomputer can perform 100 trillion calculations per second - or 15,000 calculations per second for every man, woman, and child on the planet.

Computing hours are measured in central processing units, or CPUs, which serve as the brains of a computer. If it takes 24 hours for a computer with one processor to analyze or render a simple modeling problem, it should take a computer with two processors only 12 hours to complete the same task. When scaled up to a computer with 24 processors, the calculation should only take a single hour. CCNI has more than 32,000 processors, allowing even the most complex modeling problems to be solved in vastly less time than was previously possible.

For further information on how businesses can apply for time at the supercomputer, contact Michael Ridley, Director of High Performance Computing: mridley@nystar.state.ny.us or by phone at 518-292-5700. State agencies can apply for time on the supercomputer by contacting Rico Singleton, Deputy CIO for Enterprise IT Governance: rico.singleton@oft.state.ny.us or by phone at 518-479-2807.

Portable, Solar Powered Tag Readers Could Improve Traffice Management...to be Tested in the Tech Park

As part of their ongoing effort to imporve traffic management in New York state and across the country, a team of Rensselaer researchers will be testing an array of wireless, solar-powered readers to monitor traffic flow. In the coming months, the units will be deployed to collect traffic data during the morning commute on busy Capital Region roads including in the Tech Park and on Route 4. The portable units, which are based on the same technology as E-ZPass tag readers, could eventually be used to provide valuable data for a variety of applications, from decreasing congestion in work zones to assisting emergency evacuations.

The research is funded through a $3.9 million grant from the Federal Highway Administration to the Center for Infrastructure and Transportation Studies (CITS) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The project also includes collaborators from the New York State Department of Transportation, The New York State Thruway Authority, Mark IV Industries, Inc., Annese & Associates, and North Carolina State University.

"We hope to use this technology to enable better management of our traffic system," said William "Al" Wallace, CITS director and professor of Decision Sciences and Engineering Systems at Rensselaer. In collaboration with Mark IV Industries, he and Jeffrey Wojtowicz, a Research Engineer in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Rensselaer, have developed a prototype reader that is powered by solar panels, collects data on a laptop computer, and then sends the information wirelessly back to a server. The portable device sits on a trailer that can be transported by a vehicle with a normal-duty hitch.

"This is the first field experiment of its kind," Wallace said. "The goal here is to collect data, analyze it, and find out if this really works."