An additional collaboration arose between IT staff at Rensselaer and Brookhaven to bring the massive systems on-line. Bringing the systems on-line was greatly facilitated by the sharing of scientific software, information about the installation process, and the configuring of the batch and operating systems between the two institutions.

"In addition to nanotechnology research, we are using the Blue Gene at Rensselaer for advancing research in energy, biotechnology, and medicine", stated Mark Shephard, director of Rensselaer's Scientific Computational Research Center. "An additional Blue Gene, acquired through an IBM Shared University Research (SUR) programme will be devoted to developing critical computational biology tools, with the goal of

making these available to a broad community of users", he added. Combined resources at Rensselaer will provide more than 100 teraflops to researchers.

The Brookhaven/Stony Brook centre will focus on climate studies, physics, biology, medicine, materials science, nanoscience, renewable energy, and quantitative methods in finance, according to James Davenport, director of Brookhaven's Computational Science Center. "In addition to working together to bring the Blue Genes into operation, the systems will provide a common platform for collaboration as projects are enabled."

"Having these two large systems in the State presents us with excellent research and educational opportunities", stated James Glimm, scientific operations director at the Stony Brook centre. "We are looking forward to developing additional courses and training opportunities in computational science for researchers in the region and building a knowledge base of computational tools and methods."

"These resources are another building block in the creation of a collaborative computational environment for researchers across New York's universities. Few states have the network, computational, and collaborative assets that we have", noted Christine Haile, chair of the NYSGrid Steering Committee.

Other resources available at Rensselaer and Brookhaven include a Blade Server Cluster with 462 IBM LS21 blades (1,848 Opteron 2.6 GHz processor cores) at Rensselaer and two racks of the next-generation Blue Gene/P at

Brookhaven.