Superfast Supercomputer

Mechanical Engineering, Dec 2007 by Thilmany, Jean

THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION is helping to create a powerful supercomputer that will make arithmetic calculations at more than one peta-flop-or 1,000 trillion operations-per second.

"The system will provide U.S. scientists and engineers access to unprecedented computing resources that will allow them to ask and answer complex questions we haven't even dreamed of," said Kathie Olsen, NSF's deputy director.

Scientists might use the supercomputer to study the formation and evolution of galaxies in the early universe, to understand the chains of reactions in living cells, and to aid the design of novel materials, she said.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will receive $208 million over more than four years to create the computer it will call Blue Waters. It is expected to be 500 times more powerful than today's typical supercomputers. The system is expected to go online in 2011, Olsen said.

Although Blue Waters will reside at the university, it will be operated by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and its academic and industrial partners in the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation.