SehaJ
Troublemaker
Blue Waters is a petascale supercomputer being designed and built as a joint effort between the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and IBM. Blue Waters is supported by a $208 million grant from the National Science Foundation and dedicated to open scientific research.
When Blue Waters comes online in 2011, researchers will be able to predict the behavior of complex biological systems, understand the production of heavy elements in supernova, design catalysts and other materials at the atomic level, predict changes in the earth's climate and ecosystems, and simulate complex engineered systems like power plants and airplanes.
The system will deliver sustained performance of one to two petaflops for many real-world scientific and engineering applications. Those are codes scientists and engineers use every day, not benchmarks. A petaflop is computing parlance for 1 quadrillion calculations per second.
More than 200,000 processor cores will make that performance possible. They will be coupled to more than a petabyte of memory and more than 10 petabytes of disk storage. All of that memory and storage will be globally addressable, meaning that processors will be able to share data from a single pool exceptionally quickly.
"A system with a large amount of globally addressable memory might come in at two terabytes of memory. Blue Waters will have 500 times that. This configuration makes Blue Waters a unique resource for the most compute-, memory-, and data-intensive applications. Handling data in this way means a broad range of researchers can get all of their work done in one place and don’t have to move among different machines with specialized architectures," said Rob Pennington, NCSA's deputy director.
