IBM has installed a new supercomputer at the Rutgers Discovery Informatics Institute which Rutgers said could one day be one of the world’s most powerful academic high-performance computing centers.

The New Jersey-based informatics institute is relatively new and IBM’s Blue Gene/P Supercomputer Excalibur is its first supercomputing installation. Following its first installation of one BlueGene machine, it plans to add two racks of IBM Blue Gene/Q midway through 2012 and even more computational power at a new Innovation Park on its Livingston Campus in New Jersey as a third phase of development, called RDI2.

Advisory panels are now being established for RDI2 with meetings scheduled to start in April 2012.

Once complete, the university expects to house a supercomputer ranked among the ten most powerful academic supercomputers in the world.

Rutgers Discovery Informatics Institute VP for Economic Development Margaret Brennan-Tonetta said the university hopes to set new standards for industry collaboration and high-performance computing.

“The institute will be engaging business and provide a valuable resource that goes far beyond hardware and software, offering real expertise and assistance. Industry will be able to come here with a problem involving data analysis and our experts will help them develop a solution,” Brennan-Tonetta said. 

Through a special industrial partnership, the supercomputer resources will be used for advanced analytics to improve New Jersey’s economic competitiveness, according to Rutgers’ VP for Research and Economic Development and Professor of Computer Science Michael J Pazzani.

“There is immense potential here because Rutgers and IBM have some of the best minds in high-performance computing,” Pazzani said.

“The ability to conduct data analysis on a large scale, leveraging the power of ‘big data,’ has become increasingly essential to research and development.” 

It will be used to not only support New Jersey businesses but educate the region’s workforce and will extend to research areas including cancer and genetics, medical imaging and informatics, advanced manufacturing, materials science and environmental and climate research.

“The Institute will collaborate with businesses that need high-performance computing capabilities but can’t justify the cost of building their own system,” Pazzani said. 

The BlueGene computer is housed in Rutgers’ Busch Campus at Pisscataway.

IBM also recently announced that it will work with the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) in the US to help medical professionals working with cancer using IBM Watson.

Watson will be used as a decision support tool for doctors needing information on diagnostics and treatments using a program based on MSKCC’s clinical knowledge.

Oncologists will work with Watson, helping the computer make use of patient’s medical information and providing it with vast arrays of updated and vetted treatment guidelines.

MSKCC President and CEO Craig B Thompson said the idea is to personalize cancer therapies, no matter where the patient may be receiving care.

“The combination of transformational technologies found in Watson with our cancer analytics and decision-making process has the potential to revolutionize the accessibility of information for the treatment of cancer in communities across the country and around the world,” Thompson said.