Strategic Partnerships
Computational scientists at Brookhaven will also seek to establish partnerships with key players in academia and industry (e.g. Stony Brook University’s Institute for Advanced Computational Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, IBM, and Intel). One existing example of a successful partnership is the collaboration of Brookhaven Lab’s high-energy and nuclear physics research groups with IBM that led to the development of the BlueGene supercomputing architecture now used on the world’s most powerful commercially available supercomputers.
Likewise, the future development of capabilities for advanced big data analysis will have a tremendous impact on the competitiveness of scientific and business endeavors by paving the way to gain new insights ahead of competitors through faster and more efficient routes to discovery. The presence of C3D at Brookhaven Lab, and its collaborative work with New York State partners, will therefore make New York State research and industry more competitive by developing the expertise, tools, and infrastructure to be at the forefront of transformative data science.
Industrial partners may be particularly interested in how to interface big-data experimental problems (such as those that will be explored at NSLS-II, or in the fields of high-energy and nuclear physics) with high-performance computing using advanced network technologies. “Computing-system-on-a-chip” technologies, like that used by the IBM BlueGene series, open the door to customizing high-performance network interface cards and application program interfaces (APIs).
In addition, the development of asynchronous data access and transports based on remote direct memory access techniques and improvements in quality of service for network traffic could significantly lower the energy footprint for data processing while enhancing processing performance. C3D together with planned improvements to Brookhaven National Laboratory office space and infrastructure (the Discovery Park project) will be a leading example on how to develop and attract new businesses that translate leading scientific research into widespread commercial success.