PITTSBURGH--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) and Next Tier Connect, an investment partnership between Next Tier HD and RedBird Capital Partners, are pleased to announce that PSC will locate its next fleet of supercomputers in Next Tier Connect – Pittsburgh East. Located at 4350 Northern Pike, Monroeville, PA, Next Tier Connect – Pittsburgh East is comprised of a single 505,000 square foot building that was originally developed by Westinghouse as a high security, high reliability research center supported by dual utility feeds, backup generation and high speed fiber connectivity.
Next Tier HD specializes in the development of high density data centers serving the academic research community and recently developed Georgia Tech's High Performance Computing Center located in Midtown Atlanta (www.codatechsquare.com). Next Tier HD was drawn to the Monroeville campus by the opportunity to a similar level of support to the PSC in the expansion of its own supercomputing resources.
The PSC was created by Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh to provide the national research community and the western Pennsylvania region with the massive computational capacity required for computation intensive research. The PSC collaborated with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) in securing the $10 million Bridges-2 grant. While the Bridges-2 grant will provide academic researchers access to the resulting compute capacity at no cost, a portion of that capacity will be available to the private sector at cost-recovery rate.
Nick Nystrom, PSC’s chief scientist and principal investigator (PI) for Bridges-2, said, “Researchers today need new, scalable ways for combining large, complex data with high-performance simulation and modeling, and Bridges-2 will take the next step in pioneering converged, scalable high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI) and data.”
Added Nystrom, “Bridges-2’s community data collections and user-friendly interfaces are designed to democratize participation in science and engineering and foster collaboration and convergence research. The Bridges-2 project includes bringing the benefits of scalable data analytics and AI to industry, developing STEM talent to strengthen the nation’s workforce and broadening collaborations to accelerate discovery.”
Jim Coakley, Senior Managing Partner, Next Tier Connect, said, “The NSF is funding Bridges-2 as part of a series of awards for Advanced Computing Systems & Services, and we are honored that the PSC would entrust us with the responsibility of housing those systems on our campus. Our team is already working on the improvements that will be necessary to bring those supercomputers online in the Summer of 2020.”
About Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. Established in 1986, PSC is supported by several federal agencies, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and private industry and is a leading partner in XSEDE (Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment), the National Science Foundation cyberinfrastructure program.
PSC provides university, government and industrial researchers with access to several of the most powerful systems for high-performance computing, communications and data storage available to scientists and engineers nationwide for unclassified research. PSC advances the state of the art in high-performance computing, communications and data analytics and offers a flexible environment for solving the largest and most challenging problems in computational science.
About Next Tier HD
Based in New York, NY, with offices in Washington, DC and West Palm Beach, FL, Next Tier HD is real estate investment, management and services firms that focus primarily on investments that include some form of mission criticality, data centers being one. The Company was formed in 2012 by James Coakley, Kevin Reardon and David Spiewak to deploy their firm’s experience from banking, finance, development, brokerage, accounting, asset management and IT consulting to unlock hidden real estate value in the ever changing mission critical niche. For more information, please visit www.nexttierhd.com.