Blue Waters was a

petascale Petascale computing refers to computing systems capable of calculating at least 1015 floating point operations per second (1 petaFLOPS). Petascale computing allowed faster processing of traditional supercomputer applications. The first system to ...

supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

operated by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univ ...

. On August 8, 2007, the National Science Board approved a resolution which authorized the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...

to fund "the acquisition and deployment of the world's most powerful leadership-class supercomputer." The NSF awarded $208 million for the Blue Waters project. On August 8, 2011, NCSA announced that IBM had terminated its contract to provide hardware for the project, and would refund payments to date.

Cray Inc. Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed i ...

then was awarded a $188 million contract with the

to build the supercomputer for the Blue Waters project; the supercomputer was installed in phases in 2012. It operated until December 31, 2021, and will be replaced by the

Delta Delta commonly refers to: * Delta (letter) (Δ or δ), a letter of the Greek alphabet * River delta, at a river mouth * D (NATO phonetic alphabet: "Delta") * Delta Air Lines, US * Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 that causes COVID-19 Delta may also re ...

project in 2022.

Performance

Blue Waters ran science and engineering codes at sustained speeds of at least one

petaFLOPS In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate meas ...

. It had more than 1.5 PB of memory, more than 25 PB of disk storage, and up to 500 PB of tape storage. The storage filesystem was the Cray

Lustre Lustre or Luster may refer to: Places * Luster, Norway, a municipality in Vestlandet, Norway ** Luster (village), a village in the municipality of Luster * Lustre, Montana, an unincorporated community in the United States Entertainment * '' ...

parallel file system, which is capable of terabyte-per-second storage bandwidth. It was connected with 300 Gbit/s wide area links.

Facility

A machine the scale of Blue Waters introduces special concerns with regards to cooling and power. A new National Petascale Computing Facility was built at the

at the corner of Oak Street and St. Mary's Road. This facility houses Blue Waters and other NCSA computing, networking, and data systems. The building has a machine room. The facility has been certified

LEED Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) is a green building certification program used worldwide. Developed by the non-profit U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), it includes a set of rating systems for the design, construction ...

Gold. The facility makes use of the university's campus-wide water cooling system and additional on-site cooling towers that will take advantage of the low temperatures in

Illinois Illinois ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern United States. Its largest metropolitan areas include the Chicago metropolitan area, and the Metro East section, of Greater St. Louis. Other smaller metropolita ...

during the winter months to help reduce energy consumption. The building was designed using complex fluid dynamic models to optimize the cooling system. Energy efficiency at the data center is estimated to be in the 85–90% range, far superior to the 40% efficiency typically seen in large data centers.

References

External links

{{HP Cray National Science Foundation Petascale computers University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign X86 supercomputers

Performance

Facility

See also

References

Further reading

External links