Blue Waters

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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.

[edit] Performance

Blue Waters will be the first sustained-petascale supercomputer ever built. Expected to be completed in 2011 it is planned to run at sustained speeds of at least one petaflops, or one quadrillion floating point operations per second. This is roughly 500 times more powerful than current supercomputers, and nearly four times faster than IBM's Blue Gene L.

[edit] Facility

A machine the scale of Blue Waters introduces special concerns with regards to cooling and power. A new Petscale Computing Facility is being designed and 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 95,000 square foot building, with a machine room occupying approximately 20,000 square feet (enough for both the initial Blue Waters system and a follow-on upgrade). The goal is for the facility to be LEED certified.

The facility will make use of the university's campuswide 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 itself is being designed using complex fluid dynamic models to optimize its ability to efficiently cool the air within the system. The facility is scheduled to be completed in 2010.