The center is the result of a $100 million collaboration between RPI, IBM, and New York State to further nanotechnology innovations.
The center's main focus is on reducing the cost associated with the development of nanoscale materials and devices, such as used in the semiconductor industry.
The university has also stated the center will also be used for interdisciplinary research in biotechnology, medicine, energy, and other fields.
The original supercomputer consisted of a series of IBM BlueGene/L systems which contain a total of 32,768 PowerPC 440 700 MHz processors.
There is also a heterogeneous array of Power-based Linux machines and AMD Opteron processor-based clusters running on a common file system with the main supercomputer.