Blue Waters
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Coordinates: 40°05′43″N 88°14′31″W / 40.095391°N 88.242043°W
Blue Waters is the name of a petascale supercomputer to be deployed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. On August 8, 2007, the National Science Board approved a resolution which authorized the National Science Foundation to fund "the acquisition and deployment of the world's most powerful leadership-class supercomputer." The NSF is awarding $208 million over the next four and a half years for the Blue Waters project.
On August 8, 2011, NCSA announced that IBM had terminated its contract to provide hardware for the project, and would refund payments to date.[1] Cray Inc. has won a $188 million contract with the University of Illinois to build the supercomputer for the Blue Waters project; the supercomputer will be installed in phases during the first nine months of 2012.[2]
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[edit] Performance
Blue Waters is expected to run science and engineering code at sustained speeds of at least one petaflops, or one quadrillion floating point operations per second.
[edit] Facility
A machine the scale of Blue Waters introduces special concerns with regards to cooling and power. A new National Petascale Computing Facility was built at the University of Illinois at the corner of Oak Street and St. Mary's Road. This new facility will house Blue Waters and other NCSA infrastructure. The 88,000-square-foot (8,200 m2) building has a 20,000-square-foot (1,900 m2) machine room. The facility will be LEED certified. The facility will make use of the university's campus-wide water cooling system and additional on-site cooling towers that will take advantage of the cold temperatures in Illinois during the winter months to help reduce energy consumption. The building was designed using complex fluid dynamic models to optimize the cooling system. Energy efficiency at the data center is estimated to be in the 85%-90% range, far superior to the 40% efficiency typically seen in large data centers.[3]
[edit] See also
- Register article (Nov 2009) on Blue Waters
- Blue Waters project description at the NCSA
- Register article (July 2008) on Blue Waters
- CNET News article (Dec 2009) on Blue Waters
[edit] References
- ^ http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/BlueWaters/system.html
- ^ Wood, Paul (2011-11-14). "Cray Inc. replacing IBM to build UI supercomputer". News-Gazette. http://www.news-gazette.com/news/education/2011-11-14/cray-inc-replacing-ibm-build-ui-supercomputer.html. Retrieved 2011-11-14.
- ^ IBM drops Power7 drain in 'Blue Waters'
