Illinois to get world’s fastest supercomputer at one petaflops

William Atkins
Saturday, 11 August 2007 21:46

Your IT - Home IT

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will house the $208 million Blue Water supercomputer to be built by IBM for operations beginning in 2011.

The National Science Board, the governing board of the federal agency the National Science Foundation, agreed to spend the money at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) on the Illinois campus in the city of Urbana.

According to the National Science Foundations’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI), “Today [August 8, 2007] the National Science Board (NSB) approved a resolution authorizing the National Science Foundation (NSF) to fund the acquisition and deployment of the world's most powerful "leadership-class" supercomputer, proposed in response to NSF's "Track 1" supercomputing solicitation. This "petascale" system is expected to be able to make arithmetic calculations at a sustained rate in excess of a sizzling 1,000-trillion operations per second (a "petaflop" per second) to help investigators solve some of the world's most challenging science and engineering research problems.”

The OCI website continues: “In the first award, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) will receive $208 million over 4.5 years to acquire and make available a petascale computer it calls "Blue Waters," which is 500 times more powerful than today's typical supercomputers. The system is expected to go online in 2011.”

The new supercomputer Blue Waters, which is scheduled to be completed in 2011, will be able to perform one thousand trillion mathematical operations each second, which according to computer jargan is a computational speed referred to as one petaflops.

The term petaflops refers to one quadrillion (one thousand trillion, 10¹⁵, or one thousand teraflops) floating point operations per second.

Currently, the fastest supercomputers are able to perform at teraflop (10¹²) speeds. Reportedly, IBM’s Blue Gene L is currently the world’s fastest supercomputer, but is only one-fourth as fast as the yet-to-be constructed Blue Waters supercomputer.

The University of Illinois will run the system as part of the operations of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The total contract is reportedly worth $400 million.

At such enormous speeds, scientists are already developing scientific projects for the computer. Meteorology (such as weather modeling with regards global warming, hurricanes, and storm surge effects on buildings), biophysics (such as the physical and chemical reactions that go on within living cells), and cosmology (such as the formation and evolution of galaxies in the early period of the universe) are only three of the possible ways that the computer will be used.

The University of Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications was founded in the 1980s, headed by American physicist Larry Smarr (who was associated with the University of Illinois from 1979 to 2000), in order for scientists to use computers that had, up to that time, only been available to a select few scientists at national laboratories.

The NCSA is one of five founding computer centers of the National Science Foundation’s Supercomputer Centers Program. Today, the Illinois computer center focuses on computing, data storage, and visualization resources with respect to such areas as cyberinfrastructure, cyber-resources, supercomputing, and cyberenvironments. Almost 1,360 scientists, engineers, and students use the computer facilities each year at the University of Illinois.