Blue Waters is the name of a petascale supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer that is at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation. Supercomputers were introduced in the 1960s and were designed primarily by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation , which led the market into the 1970s until Cray left to form his own company, Cray Research. He then took over being designed and built as a joint effort between the National Center for Supercomputing Applications The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is a state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale cyberinfrastructure that advances science and engineering. NCSA operates as a unit of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign but it provides high-performance computing resources to researchers across the country. Support, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a public research university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the oldest and largest campus in the University of Illinois system, and IBM International Business Machines (NYSE: IBM) is a multinational computer, technology and IT consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, North Castle, New York, United States. IBM is the world's fourth largest technology company and the second most valuable by global brand (after Coca-Cola). IBM is one of the few information technology companies. On August 8, 2007 the National Science Board The National Science Board of the United States is composed of 25 members appointed by the President and confirmed by the United States Senate, representing the broad U.S. science and engineering community. The Board establishes the policies of the NSF within the framework of applicable national policies set forth by the President and the Congress approved a resolution which authorized the National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health. With an annual budget of about US$6.87 billion (fiscal year 2010), the NSF funds approximately 20 percent of 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.
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Hardware
Blue Waters, an implementation of PERCS technology, is planned to be composed of:
- more than 300,000 eight-core POWER7 CPUs with 32MB on-die L3 cache running at 4.0 GHz
- more than 1 petabyte A petabyte is a unit of information equal to one quadrillion (short scale) bytes, or 1000 terabytes. It is abbreviated PB. The prefix peta- (P) indicates a power of 1000: 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 In computing, floating point describes a system for representing numbers that would be too large or too small to be represented as integers. Numbers are in general represented approximately to a fixed number of significant digits and scaled using an exponent. The base for the scaling is normally 2, 10 or 16. The typical number that can be 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 10 petaflops. This would imply a sustained speed significantly higher than one petaflop, depending on application requirements.
Facility
A machine the scale of Blue Waters introduces special concerns with regards to cooling and power. A new National Petascale Computing Facility is being built at the University of Illinois The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a public research university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the oldest and largest campus in the University of Illinois system 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 20,000-square-foot machine room. The facility will be LEED LEED is an internationally recognized green building certification system, providing third-party verification that a building or community was designed and built using strategies aimed at improving performance across all the metrics that matter most: energy savings, water efficiency, CO2 emissions reduction, improved indoor environmental quality, 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 United States migrant settlers began arriving from Kentucky in the 1810s; Illinois achieved statehood in 1818. The future metropolis of Chicago was founded in the 1830s on the banks of the Chicago River, one of the few natural harbors on southern Lake Michigan. Railroads and John Deere's invention of the self-scouring steel plow made central 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 2011.
Energy efficiency at the data center is estimated to be in the 85%-90% range, far superior to the 40% efficiency typically seen in large data centers.[1]
References
- Register article (Nov 2009) on Blue Waters
- Blue Waters project description at the NCSA
- Register article (July 2008) on Blue Waters
- CNET News article (Dec 2009) on Blue Waters
Categories: Supercomputers | IBM supercomputers | Power Architecture | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | National Science Foundation |
