Troy, N.Y., June 5 -- Leading “big data” analytics firm GNS Healthcare has signed a multi-year agreement to extend and expand its membership with the Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations (CCNI) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The agreement enables GNS to continue and grow its use of CCNI’s massively parallel computational resources to directly support its research and operations.

CCNI is a $100 million partnership between Rensselaer, IBM, and New York state. The center houses one of the world’s most powerful university-based supercomputers and is a national leader in promoting the application of high-performance computing in industry. CCNI supports a network of more than 700 researchers in academia and industry across a diverse spectrum of disciplines.

“One of our primary goals as a public-private partnership is to support economic growth through the use of high-performance computing and we’re delighted that GNS will continue to have access to the computing power it needs to innovate, grow, and move into new business areas,” said CCNI Director James Myers.

“GNS has partnered with CCNI since 2007 to drive healthcare innovation through the application of GNS’s supercomputer-driven REFS modeling and simulation platform using CCNI’s high-performance computing. Having access to one of the world’s largest supercomputing resources and working with the expert staff at CCNI for many years has allowed us to deliver results from ‘big data’ that would not have been possible using solely internal computing resources. Today, the flexibility that CCNI provides as our business continues to rapidly grow enables us to seamlessly tackle our partners’ biggest challenges,” said Thomas A. Neyarapally, GNS Healthcare senior vice president, corporate development.

In June 2011, GNS Healthcare became one of 10 companies whose success in leveraging high-performance computing was documented through a case study developed jointly by the Council on Competitiveness and the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA). GNS employs its proprietary machine learning algorithms in the REFS technology platform on massively parallel supercomputers to analyze vast amounts of biomedical information, discovering new insights into the complex, clinical causes of human disease, and new opportunities for diagnosis and treatment. The company’s technology has helped its collaborators improve treatment of major diseases including multiple sclerosis and cancer and reduce instances of harmful drug interactions for patients taking medicine.

“We are laser-focused on delivering value to our industrial partners and helping them achieve their strategic research goals by leveraging CCNI’s expertise, software, and computing resources,” Myers said. “With GNS, which itself is a provider of software and solutions to the medical and pharmaceutical communities, we act as a resource provider. They see us as a cloud —a powerful one with a supercomputer in it—that lets them concentrate on their business rather than worrying about the capital costs and complexities of running a supercomputer on their own.”

CCNI opened its doors in 2007 with more than 100 teraflops of computing power, and today supports a broad range of at-scale modeling, simulation, and analysis research across a spectrum of science and engineering disciplines. The center is committed to hastening the advance of ever-shrinking computer chips and other devices that are designed and manufactured by the micro- and nanoelectronics industry and to driving the academic and industrial adoption of computationally and data-intensive techniques. Over the last five years, more than 700 researchers from 50 universities, companies, and government laboratories have run high-performance science and engineering applications at CCNI.

Last year, Rensselaer won a $2.65 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to purchase, install, and run a new balanced, green supercomputing system at CCNI designed to support the development of next-generation computational and data-intensive applications. The new system is expected to be comprised of a powerful IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer along with a multiterabyte memory (RAM) storage accelerator, petascale disk storage, rendering cluster, and remote display wall systems. The new system will be a national resource for academic and industrial researchers across many different disciplines.

For more information on CNNI at Rensselaer, visit:

• Rensselaer Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations (CCNI)
http://www.rpi.edu/research/ccni/

• Innovating New Ways To Share and Preserve Scientific Data on Sustainability
http://news.rpi.edu/update.do?artcenterkey=2952

• New Supercomputer To Boost Rensselaer Leadership in High-Performance Computing
http://www.rpi.edu/about/inside/issue/v5n14/supercomputer.html

• Rensselaer Supercomputer Director Named to National Initiative on High Performance Computing
http://news.rpi.edu/update.do?artcenterkey=2872

• Rensselaer Alumni Magazine: SuperPower
http://www.rpi.edu/magazine/fall2007/superpower-1.html

About REFS

REFS (Reverse Engineering-Forward Simulation) is comprised of integrated machine learning algorithms and software that extract causal relationships from complex, multidimensional data and enable the simulation of billions of ‘what if?’ hypotheses to explore novel unseen conditions and predictions forward in time. This model-centric discovery and simulation approach represents a paradigm shift in data analysis, leapfrogging existing approaches such as high-dimensional pattern matching.

About GNS Healthcare

GNS Healthcare is a “Big Data” analytics company that has developed a scalable approach for the discovery of what works in healthcare, and for whom. GNS Healthcare’s analytics solutions are being applied across the healthcare industry: from pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, health plans and hospitals, to integrated delivery systems, Pharmacy Benefits Managers (PBMs), and Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs). Whether your organization is delivering care or developing personalized therapies and diagnostics, GNS Healthcare can help you discover the knowledge you need to match patients with treatments that work.

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Source: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute