Video: An Overview of the Blue Waters Supercomputer at NCSA


 
In this video, Robert Brunner from NCSA presents: Blue Waters System Overview.

Blue Waters is one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. Scientists and engineers across the country use the computing and data power of Blue Waters to tackle a wide range of challenging problems, from predicting the behavior of complex biological systems to simulating the evolution of the cosmos.

Blue Waters, built from the latest technologies from Cray, Inc., uses hundreds of thousands of computational cores to achieve peak performance of more than 13 quadrillion calculations per second. If you could multiply two numbers together every second, it would take you millions of years to do what Blue Waters does each second. Blue Waters also has:

  • more than 1.5 petabytes of memory, enough to store 300 million images from your digital camera;
  • more than 25 petabytes of disk storage, enough to store all of the printed documents in all of the world’s libraries; and
  • up to 500 petabytes of tape storage, enough to store 10 percent of all of the words spoken in the existence of humankind.

If you are interested in learning more, the Blue Waters team and the International HPC Training Consortium are staging monthly Blue Waters Webinars on visualization, workflows, and other topics.

Download the Slides (PDF)

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