Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is home to more than 15 multi-user shared core facilities and resources supported by several research centers and available to the research community, external collaborators, and industry partners. Our expert technical staff provides guidance and support to their users to maintain an active, vibrant research community.
Center for Materials, Devices, and Integrated Systems (cMDIS)
The Micro and Nanofabrication Cleanroom (MNCR) is a 6,000-square-foot Class 100 (10,000 total square-foot) space at the Center for Industry Innovation (CII). It offers a broad range of processing, measurement, and fabrication tools for creating new structures, devices, and systems at the micro- and nanoscale. While the facility can handle up to 8” wafer processing, it routinely processes a much wider range of sample geometries for high-speed electronics, power devices, ICs, microsystems, energy storage devices, fluidics, and a wide range of applications. The MNCR performs end-to-end device fabrication, characterization, metrology, and testing services for users from universities, local start-ups, and industrial institutions for research, education, and economic development.
The Nanoscale Characterization Core offers a powerful suite of tools for characterizing materials and devices via microscopy, surface analysis, spectroscopy, and diffraction techniques. The chemistry, composition, morphology, and structure of various samples can be evaluated down to the nanometer level.
Computational Center for Innovations (CCI)
The Computational Center for Innovations (CCI) was formed in 2007 through a partnership between Rensselaer, New York State, and IBM with the mission of supporting continued advances in shrinking device dimensions and the development of new nanotechnologies across a wide array of industries. The CCI operates heterogeneous supercomputing systems consisting of massively parallel IBM DCS supercomputer and Intel Xeon processor-based clusters.
The computational power of the current hardware configuration is rated at over 12 PF peak. These systems are supported by over a petabyte of disk storage. The CCI has dedicated high-speed connections to the main campus with up to 32 fiber lines available for growth, as well as a direct connection to the NYSERNet optical infrastructure and Internet2 that provides access to the national and international high-speed networks.
Artificial Intelligence Multiprocessing Optimized System (AiMOS) is a supercomputer using a heterogeneous system architecture that includes IBM POWER9 CPUs connected to NVIDIA GPUs with the industry’s only CPU-to-GPU NVIDIA NVLink interface, which increases GPU memory bandwidth up to 5.6x.
AiMOS serves as the test bed for the New York State-IBM Research AI Hardware Center and is being used to advance the development of computing chips and systems that are designed and optimized for AI workloads and are pushing the boundaries of AI performance. AiMOS will provide the modeling, simulation, and computation necessary to support the development of this hardware.
This supercomputer is accessible to collaborators from public and private industry partners and to Rensselaer faculty, students, and staff engaged in ongoing research collaborations that employ and advance AI technology. These initiatives include the Rensselaer-IBM Artificial Intelligence Research Collaboration, which brings researchers at both institutions together to explore new frontiers in AI; the Cognitive and Immersive Systems Lab; and The Jefferson Project, which combines Internet of Things technology and powerful analytics to help manage and protect one of New York’s largest lakes while creating a data-based blueprint for preserving bodies of fresh water around the globe.