Blue Waters

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Blue Waters is the name of a petascale supercomputer being designed and built as a joint effort between the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and IBM. On August 8, 2007 the National Science Board approved a resolution which authorized the National Science Foundation to fund "the acquisition and deployment of the world's most powerful leadership-class supercomputer." The NSF is awarding $208 million over the next four and a half years for the Blue Waters project.

Hardware

Blue Waters is planned to be composed of:

• more than 25,000 eight-core POWER7 CPUs with 32MB on-die L3 cache running at 4.0 GHz (200,000 cores)
• more than 1 petabyte of main memory
• more than 10 petabytes of disk storage
• half an exabyte of archival storage
• up to 400 Gbit/s external (Internet) connectivity

Performance

Expected to be completed in 2011, Blue Waters is expected to run science and engineering codes at sustained speeds of at least one petaflops, or one quadrillion floating point operations per second. This is nearly four times faster than IBM's Blue Gene/L. IBM has stated that Blue Waters will have a system peak speed of 20 petaflops. This would imply a sustained speed significantly higher than one petaflop, in the vicinity of 15 petaflops.

Facility

A machine the scale of Blue Waters introduces special concerns with regards to cooling and power. A new Petascale Computing Facility is being designed and built at the University of Illinois at the corner of Oak Street and St. Mary's Road. This new facility will house Blue Waters and other NCSA infrastructure. The facility will be a 88,000-square-foot (8,200 m²) building, with a machine room occupying approximately 20,000 square feet (enough for both the initial Blue Waters system and a follow-on upgrade). The goal is for the facility to be LEED certified.

The facility will make use of the university's campus wide water cooling system and additional on-site cooling towers that will take advantage of the cold temperatures in Illinois during the winter months to help reduce energy consumption. The building is being designed using complex fluid dynamic models to optimize the cooling system. The facility is scheduled to be completed in 2010.

References

• Blue Waters project description at the NCSA
• Register article (July 2008) on Blue Waters
• CNET News article (Dec 2009) on Blue Waters

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