Blue Waters was a

petascale Petascale computing refers to computing systems capable of performing at least 1 quadrillion (10^15) floating-point operations per second (FLOPS). These systems are often called petaflops systems and represent a significant leap from traditional ...

supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of 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 instruc ...

operated by the

National Center for Supercomputing Applications The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is a unit of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and provides high-performance computing resources to researchers in the United States. NCSA is currently led by Professor Bill ...

(NCSA) at the

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, U of I, Illinois, or University of Illinois) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Champaign–Urbana metropolitan area, Illinois, United ...

. On August 8, 2007, the

National Science Board The National Science Board (NSB) of the United States establishes the policies of the National Science Foundation (NSF) within the framework of applicable national policies set forth by the President of the United States, president and the United ...

approved a resolution which authorized the

National Science Foundation The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...

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 International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

had terminated its contract to provide hardware for the project, and would refund payments to date. Cray Inc. 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 was replaced by the

Delta Delta commonly refers to: * Delta (letter) (Δ or δ), the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet * D (NATO phonetic alphabet: "Delta"), the fourth letter in the Latin alphabet * River delta, at a river mouth * Delta Air Lines, a major US carrier ...

project in April 2022.

Performance

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

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

. 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 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 systems, green building certification program used worldwide. Developed by the non-profit U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), it includes a set of rating ...

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

Illinois Illinois ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern United States. It borders on Lake Michigan to its northeast, the Mississippi River to its west, and the Wabash River, Wabash and Ohio River, Ohio rivers to its ...

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

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

Performance

Facility

See also

References

Further reading

External links