About the Blue Waters project

The Blue Waters project will provide a computational system capable of sustained petaflop performance on a range of science and engineering applications. The project also includes intense support for application development and system software development, interactions with business and industry, and educational programs. This comprehensive approach will ensure that users across the country will be able to use Blue Waters to its fullest potential.

The dramatic increase in computing capability with this unrivaled national asset will create breakthrough advances in nearly all fields of science and engineering. When Blue Waters comes online in 2011, researchers will be able to predict the behavior of complex biological systems, understand the production of heavy elements in supernova, design catalysts and other materials at the atomic level, predict changes in the earth's climate and ecosystems, and simulate complex engineered systems like power plants and airplanes.

Blue Waters is a joint effort of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IBM, and the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation. It is supported by the National Science Foundation.

This unprecedented machine will be the first of a powerful new system design from IBM, maker of nearly half of the world's 500 fastest computers. Known as PERCS (Productive, Easy-to-use, Reliable Computing System), the design required research and development in new chip technology, interconnect technology, operating systems, compiler, and programming environments. Blue Waters will be based on IBM's POWER7 hardware.

Substantial investments will be made by the Blue Waters partnership to enhance the scalability and performance of existing science and engineering applications and to develop new applications that take full advantage of the extraordinary capabilities that Blue Waters will provide. The partnership will develop an enhanced version of IBM's high-performance computing environment to ensure that applications achieve high sustained performance. The enhanced environment will increase the productivity of application developers, system administrators, and users by providing an integrated toolset to use Blue Waters and analyze and control its behavior.

The Blue Waters project also includes a far-reaching educational and workforce development program. It will impact students from K-12 through postgraduate education, reaching out to geographical areas and populations underrepresented in supercomputing. At the undergraduate level, the program will educate the next generation of graduate students, K-12 teachers, future technical staff, and the informed public. At the graduate and postgraduate levels, the program will educate and train the next generation of researchers.

An expanded industrial partner program will be an integral part of the Blue Waters project. Members of the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation will work with their business and industry partners to introduce them to the world of petascale computing, giving industrial outreach a truly national scale.

Blue Waters project leadership team
Thom H. Dunning, Jr., Project Director
National Center for Supercomputing Applications and Department of Chemistry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

William T.C. Kramer, Deputy Project Director
National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Wen-mei Hwu, co-principal investigator
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Marc Snir, co-principal investigator
Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

William Gropp, co-principal investigator
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign