Companies, researchers encouraged to apply for Blue Waters time

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This from NCSA this week

The National Science Foundation is currently soliciting proposals from researchers who are interested in tackling challenging science and engineering problems using Blue Waters, a sustained petascale supercomputer that will come online in 2011 at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Time on Blue Waters will be awarded through the National Science Foundation’s Petascale Computing Resource Allocation (PRAC) program.

The PRAC program is open to universities, government laboratories, and industry; proposals are due Mar 17, 2010. Access to Blue Waters will be free for non-proprietary research; those wishing to keep their results to themselves have to pay

Companies may also join NCSA’s Private Sector Program. The program offers opportunities to perform proprietary research on Blue Waters, as well as other work on Blue Waters and on other projects. Computing time through the Private Sector Program is available on a cost-recovery basis.

You’ll need to know what you are applying to use, so here’s a rundown

Blue Waters will have a peak performance of 10 petaflops, a performance that can be attained only with more than 300,000 compute cores, and a peak memory bandwidth of nearly 5 petabytes/second. Blue Waters will have more than 1 petabyte of memory, 10 petabytes of user disk storage, and 500 petabytes of archival storage. The interprocessor communications network will have a bisection bandwidth far greater than what is available today, greatly facilitating scaling to large numbers of compute cores. The high-performance I/O subsystem will enable the solution of the most challenging data-intensive problems.