Featured Post from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Introducing AiMOS, The Most Powerful Supercomputer at a Private University

Jan 16, 2020

2 min

Christopher D. Carothers

The most powerful supercomputer to debut on the November 2019 Top500 ranking of supercomputers, also the most powerful supercomputer in New York State, was recently unveiled at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Center for Computational Innovations (CCI). Part of a collaboration between IBM, Empire State Development (ESD), and NY CREATES, the eight petaflop IBM POWER9-equipped AI supercomputer is configured to help enable users to explore new AI applications and accelerate economic development from New York’s smallest startups to its largest enterprises.




AiMOS is:


  • The most powerful supercomputer housed at a private university.
  • The 24th most powerful supercomputer in the world.
  • The third-most energy efficient supercomputer in the world.


Named AiMOS (short for Artificial Intelligence Multiprocessing Optimized System) in honor of Rensselaer co-founder Amos Eaton, the machine will serve as a test bed for the New York State-IBM Research AI Hardware Center, which opened on the SUNY Polytechnic Institute (SUNY Poly) campus in Albany earlier this year. The AI Hardware Center aims to advance the development of computing chips and systems that are designed and optimized for AI workloads to push the boundaries of AI performance. AiMOS will provide the modeling, simulation, and computation necessary to support the development of this hardware.


“The established expertise in computation and data analytics at Rensselaer, when combined with AiMOS, will enable many of our research projects to make significant strides that simply were not possible on our previous platform,” said Christopher Carothers, director of the CCI and professor of computer science at Rensselaer. “Our message to the campus and beyond is that, if you are doing work on large-scale data analytics, machine learning, AI, and scientific computing, then it should be running at the CCI.”


Built using the same IBM Power Systems technology as the world’s smartest supercomputers, the US Dept. of Energy’s Summit and Sierra supercomputers, AiMOS uses a heterogeneous system architecture that includes IBM POWER9 CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs. This enables AiMOS with a capacity of eight quadrillion calculations per second.


You can watch Rensselaer President Shirley Ann Jackson talk about AiMOS here:



Chris Carothers is the director of the Center for Computational Innovations (CCI) at Rensselaer. He is available to speak with media about AiMOS and what it can enable – simply click on his icon to arrange an interview.


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Christopher D. Carothers

Christopher D. Carothers

Director, Center for Computational Innovations (CCI) & Professor, Computer Science

Researches massively parallel computer systems with a focus on modeling and simulation systems

Information and Computer ScienceParallel Discrete-Event SimulationComputer ScienceMassively Parallel SystemsModeling and Simulation Systems

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