$208M Blue Waters reaches "go" stage

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HPCwire carried news last week of contract finalization on the Blue Waters project at NCSA

IBM logoExtending 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.

This is one of the DARPA-funded PERCS systems and will have 200K cores, “more than” a petabyte of memory, and 10 PB of disk.

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.