CCR enables WNY business innovation with new industry cluster

In 2014, local businesses began partnering with CCR to access the first compute cluster dedicated to enabling innovation in the Western New York business community.  Over 37 companies took advantage of this opportunity and have utilized this computing infrastructure to expand R&D, develop proof-of-concept products, and offer services that helped leverage future opportunities for funding.  With this proven track record, CCR was awarded additional financial support from the Empire State Development Corporation to  expand this initiative.

CCR wanted to support a diverse set of business needs, so they surveyed companies working in artificial intelligence, machine learning, scientific and environmental modeling to discover their future computing needs. After a competitive bidding process, CCR secured a Dell Technologies solution with 99 compute nodes, each with 56 cores and at least 512GB of RAM.  A subset of the nodes has either 1TB of RAM or dual NVIDIA A100 GPUs.  This cluster adds over 5,500 cores to CCR’s compute capacity.

The new equipment is already in use for various business cases.  CIE Professor, Dr. Alan Rabideau, is using it for work with the Buffalo Sewer Authority to model, study, and design solutions to combined sewer overflow within the City of Buffalo.  Marion Surgical, a company developing augmented reality solutions to better teach surgeons complex procedures, uses the cluster to build individualized simulations with real-world patient scans allowing surgeons to practice before live surgery.  Garwood Medical Devices uses the CCR cluster to aid in the development of a novel treatment for biofilm infections around implantable devices.  Working with Dr. Mark Ehrensberger, associate  professor of biomedical engineering, and doctoral candidate Priyanshu Vishnoi, extensive computational simulations were used which led to a validated model which was accepted by the FDA.  Check out the Case Study published by Intel for more details about the cluster and the companies using it.

This new cluster benefits academic researchers as well, as idle nodes may be utilized for research when not in use by a company.  If you're an existing CCR user and want more information on utilizing the 'scavenger' partitions on CCR clusters, check out our knowledgebase article and virtual workshop.  Companies interested in access this new cluster are encouraged to visit our informational page at buffalo.edu/ccr/industry.