- Blue Waters
"For the football club, see
Blue Waters F.C. "Blue Waters is the name of a
petascale supercomputer being designed and built as a joint effort between theNational Center for Supercomputing Applications , theUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign , andIBM . OnAugust 8 ,2007 theNational Science Board approved a resolution which authorized theNational 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.Architecture
Blue Waters is planned to be composed of 38,900 eight-core
POWER7 chips with each chip running at 4.0GHz.Performance
Expected to be completed in 2011, Blue Waters is expected to run science and engineering codes at sustained speeds of at least one petaflops, or one
quadrillion floating point operations per second. This is nearly four times faster than IBM'sBlue Gene L . One [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/11/ibm_power7_ncsa/ source] has stated that Blue Waters may hit a peak system speed of 10 petaflops.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 convert|88000|sqft|m2|sing=on 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 beLEED 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 2010.Reference
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/11/ibm_power7_ncsa/ The Register article on Blue Waters]
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