A powerful new supercomputer is going online at the Rensselaer Technology Park in North Greenbush. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute on Thursday took the wraps off AMOS - the Advanced Multi Processing Optimized System. It's an IBM supercomputer that the college is partnering with the famous WATSON supercomputer from TV Jeopardy! fame, making RPI one of the strongest research institutes in the nation.
RPI president Shirley Ann Jackson says AMOS, named for Rensselaer co-founder Amos Eaton, performs a quadrillion calculations per second, and will allow the school to partner with more businesses to boost companies’ productivity.
Jackson says AMOS, with its data intensive computing capacity, is now among the four most powerful university-based supercomputers in the United States.
School officials say AMOS is a critical cornerstone of the Rensselaer Institute for Data Exploration and Applications—known as The Rensselaer IDEA — which serves as a hub for Rensselaer faculty, staff, and students engaged in data-driven discovery and innovation. The ultimate goal is to run WATSON on AMOS, creating one giant supercomputer.
The supercomputer is only the latest advancement in so-called Tech Valley, where chipfab plant GlobalFoundries and the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering have energized the region.
