Blue Waters, One of the World’s Most Powerful Computers, Is Open for Research
Blue Waters has been configured to solve the most challenging compute-, memory-, and data-intensive problems in science and engineering
National Science Foundation- (NSF) funded Blue Waters, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, was formally declared available for use today at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). The ceremony was attended by corporate, government and university leaders.
Blue Waters, a partnership among NSF, the State of Illinois, the University of Illinois and the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation, is capable at peak performance of nearly 12 quadrillion floating point operations per second and, more importantly, has demonstrated sustained system performance of more than one petaflop on a range of commonly-used science and engineering applications.
This capability puts Blue Waters in a class by itself. By balancing processor performance characteristics with memory and storage attributes, it offers usable and efficient petaflop performance for large-scale scientific applications at the frontiers of computational science.
Early research on Blue Waters already is addressing problems that are much larger and more complex than those modeled to date, and is already providing unprecedented insights.
“Blue Waters is an example of a high-risk, high-reward research infrastructure project that will enable NSF to achieve its mission of funding basic research at the frontiers of science,” said NSF Acting Director Cora Marrett. “Its impact on science and engineering discoveries and innovation, as well as on national priorities, such as health, safety and well-being, will be extraordinary.”