HPCwire: Petascale Project Blue Waters Gets Green Light

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August 27, 2008

Petascale Project Blue Waters Gets Green Light

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Aug. 27 -- Extending more than 50 years of supercomputing leadership, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and its National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) announced today that they have finalized their contract with IBM to build the world's first sustained petascale computational system dedicated to open scientific research. This leadership-class project, called Blue Waters, is supported by a $208 million grant from the National Science Foundation and will come online in 2011.

"Blue Waters will be an unrivaled national asset that will have a powerful impact on both science and society," said Thom Dunning NCSA director and a professor of chemistry at Illinois. "Scientists around the country -- simulating new medicines or materials, the weather, disease outbreaks, or complex engineered systems like power plants and aircraft -- are poised to make discoveries that we can only begin to imagine."

The system will deliver sustained performance of more than one petaflop on many real-world scientific and engineering applications. A petaflop is computing parlance for 1 quadrillion calculations per second.

"Our community traditionally uses peak performance to measure the output of a system based on simple benchmarks. It's a measure that's never achieved in real life," Dunning said. "With Blue Waters, we're focused intently on sustained performance -- genuine performance on codes that scientists and engineers use every day instead of unattainable benchmark figures."

More than 200,000 processor cores will make that performance possible. They will be coupled to more than a petabyte of memory and more than 10 petabytes of disk storage. All of that memory and storage will be globally addressable, meaning that processors will be able to share data from a single pool exceptionally quickly.

"A system with a large amount of globally addressable memory might come in at two terabytes of memory. Blue Waters will have 500 times that. This configuration makes Blue Waters a unique resource for the most compute-, memory-, and data-intensive applications. Handling data in this way means a broad range of researchers can get all of their work done in one place and don't have to move among different machines with specialized architectures," said Rob Pennington, NCSA's deputy director.

This unprecedented machine will be the first of a powerful new system design from IBM, maker of nearly half of the world's 500 fastest computers. Known as PERCS (Productive, Easy-to-use, Reliable Computing System), the design required research and development in new chip technology, interconnect technology, operating systems, compiler, and programming environments. It will run a large and varied set of commercial and technical high-performance computing applications.

To create a broad range of achievements in science and engineering, Blue Waters will require an intense, years-long collaboration among Illinois, NCSA, IBM, and the dozens of universities, colleges, research laboratories, and institutes that have formed the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation. This partnership is dedicated to encouraging the widespread and effective use of petascale computing to advance scientific discovery and the state-of-the-art in engineering, to increasing regional and national competitiveness, and to training tomorrow's computational researchers and educators.

"Our relationship with Illinois, NCSA, and their partners throughout the country will help deliver an extraordinary new system," said Dave Turek, vice president of supercomputing at IBM. "The work to come on Blue Waters will usher in a new era in supercomputing, ultimately providing a powerful new platform for scientists, engineers, and commercial users."

Recognizing the promise of petascale computing, the state of Illinois and the University of Illinois have pledged additional support so that researchers can fully exploit Blue Waters' unique capabilities. This support will include construction of a facility to house the system and a new Center for Petascale Computing.

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