Blue Waters is expected to be one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.

Scientists will create breakthroughs in nearly all fields of science using Blue Waters. Blue Waters is a joint effort of : The University of Illinois, its National Center for Supercomputing Applications IBM, and The Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation.

It is also supported by the National Science Foundation.

The fastest high-performance systems in existence. Typically multi core Most require environmentally controlled rooms. Price tag ranges from $500,000 to millions of dollars.

Tianhe-1A

Cray Jaguar

Blue Gene

Earth Simulator

It will have a peak performance of 10 petaflops (10 quadrillion calculations every second) .

Proportions: 1 calculation = 1 second 1,000,000,000 calculations = 32 years 1,000,000,000,000 calculations = 31,000 years

FLOPS: FLoating point Operations Per Second

1,000,000,000,000,000 calculations = 31 million years

1,000,000,000,000,000 calculations = 1 second

More than 300,000 compute cores A peak memory bandwidth of nearly 5 petabytes/second More than 1 petabyte of memory 18 petabytes of disk storage 500 petabytes of archival storage Support up to 128 GB DDR3 DRAM memory per processor Have clock frequency in the 3.5-4 GHz range

IBM's multicore POWER7 processors will:

Include eight high-performance cores Feature simultaneous multithreading Have three levels of cache

Integrated Application Development Environment

The environment will include debuggers, compilers, mathematical libraries, support tools and workflow frameworks that can be used to automatically guide complex, multistep calculations.

I/O subsystem The Blue Waters I/O subsystem will provide a peak I/O rate greater than 1.5 TB/s .

Petascale science and engineering

To ensure those scientists success, the Blue Waters team is helping teams around the country prepare their codes to run on Blue Waters and other computing systems like it.

Software configuration

Blue Waters will use Linux as its operating system. Low-level active messaging layer. Eclipse-based application framework to support development. The Charm++ infrastructure. Advanced performance tools

Architect

Project Director

Chief Software

Thom Dunning
IBM Systems Technical Manager

Marc Snir

Architect

Bill Kramer

Chief Applications

Bill Gropp
Senior Project Manager Chief Hardware Architect

Cristina Beldica

Wen-mei Hwu

Scientists with the Blue Waters will be able to:

Predict

the behavior of complex biological systems. Understand how the cosmos evolved after the Big Bang. Design new materials at the atomic level. Predict the behavior of hurricanes and tornadoes. Simulate complex engineered systems like the power distribution system, airplanes and automobiles.