Blue Waters
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40°05′43″N 88°14′31″W / 40.095391°N 88.242043°W
Blue Waters is the name of 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. 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.
Hardware
Blue Waters, an implementation of PERCS technology, is planned to be composed of:
- more than 300,000 eight-core POWER7 CPUs with 32MB on-die L3 cache running at 4.0 GHz
- more than 1 petabyte of main memory
- more than 10 petabytes of disk storage
- half an exabyte of archival storage
- up to 400 Gbit/s external (Internet) connectivity
Performance
Expected to be completed in 2011, 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. This is nearly four times faster than IBM's Blue Gene/L. IBM has stated that Blue Waters will have a system peak speed of 10 petaflops. This would imply a sustained speed significantly higher than one petaflop, depending on application requirements.
Facility
A machine the scale of Blue Waters introduces special concerns with regards to cooling and power. A new National Petascale Computing Facility is being 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 facility will be a 88,000-square-foot (8,200 m2) building, with 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 is being designed using complex fluid dynamic models to optimize the cooling system. The facility is scheduled to be completed in 2011.
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.[1]
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
References
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