ACM TechNews

Massive $208 Million Petascale Computer Gets Green Light

Network World (09/02/08)

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's National Center for Supercomputing Applications has finalized a contract with IBM to build Blue Waters, a 200,000-processor supercomputer that will provide a sustained performance of more than 1 petaflop. The 200,000 processors will be paired with more than a petabyte of memory and more than 10 petabytes of disk storage. The memory and storage will be made globally addressable so the processors will be able to share data from a single pool exceptionally quickly. The new supercomputer, which will go online in 2011, is supported by a $208 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant. Blue Waters will be based on Productive, Easy-to-use, Reliable Computing System technology. NSF says the system may be used to study complex processes such as the interaction of the Sun's coronal mass ejections with the Earth's magnetosphere and ionosphere, the formation and evolutions of galaxies in the early universe, understanding the chains of reactions that occur with living cells, and the design of novel materials. NSF says that by 2010 or 2011, academic researchers will be able to access numerous high-performance systems that provide sustained performance between 10 teraflops and 2 petaflops for a variety science and engineering projects that are integrated into a national cyberinfrastructure environment and supported at a national, regional, or campus level.

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/32152

---

© Copyright 2008 Information, Inc. This service may be reproduced for internal distribution.