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August 10, 2007
NSB Approves Funds for Petascale Computing Systems
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Aug. 8 -- Today the National Science Board (NSB) approved a resolution authorizing the National Science Foundation (NSF) to fund the acquisition and deployment of the world's most powerful "leadership-class" supercomputer, proposed in response to NSF's "Track 1" supercomputing solicitation. This "petascale" system is expected to be able to make arithmetic calculations at a sustained rate in excess of a sizzling 1,000-trillion operations per second (a "petaflop" per second) to help investigators solve some of the world's most challenging science and engineering research problems.
A second resolution, for a "Track 2" system, authorized funding for a smaller, but still extremely powerful system expected to bridge the gap between current high-performance computers (HPC) and even more advanced petascale systems under development.
Both awards must still go through administrative and financial processing by NSF before they become final. That process will likely be completed this fall.
"Working at the frontiers of knowledge is increasing the demand for powerful cyberinfrastructure," said NSF Deputy Director Kathie L. Olsen. "The Track 1 system will provide U.S. scientists and engineers access to unprecedented petascale computing resources that will allow them to ask and answer complex questions we haven't even dreamed of."
NSF's Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) supports programs to create and operate several levels of advanced, high-performance computing systems that will allow science and engineering researchers to ask and answer ever larger and more complex questions. The NSB actions today approved funding for "Track 1" and "Track 2" awards to enable petascale science and engineering through the deployment and support of the most capable world-class combination of assets available to the academic community.
Track 1: A Leadership-Class System
In the first award, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) will receive $208 million over 4.5 years to acquire and make available a petascale computer it calls "Blue Waters," which is 500 times more powerful than today's typical supercomputers. The system is expected to go online in 2011.
Under the direction of Dr. Thomas Dunning, Blue Waters will reside at UIUC where it will be operated by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and its academic and industry partners in the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation. The system may be used, for example, to study complex processes like the interaction of the Sun's coronal mass ejections with the Earth's magnetosphere and ionosphere; the formation and evolution of galaxies in the early universe; understanding the chains of reactions that occur with living cells; and the design of novel materials.
The project will also impact the preparation of a new generation of students with the skills required to make effective use of high-performance computing in academia and industry. UIUC and its partners, including the Southeast Universities Research Association, the Great Lakes Consortium and the Shodor Education Foundation, will integrate petascale computing into pre-college and college education and develop a new virtual school of computational science and engineering that will have an impact on a national scale..
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