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NSF Announces Supercomputer Grant Winners

Posted by samzenpus on from the I-can't-allow-you-to-do-that-dave dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The NSF has tentatively announced that the Track 1 leadership class supercomputer will be awarded to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Track 2 award winner is University of Tennessee-Knoxville and its partners." From the article: "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 second award will fund the deployment and operation of an extremely powerful supercomputer at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville Joint Institute for Computational Science (JICS). The $65 million, 5-year project will include partners at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Texas Advanced Computing Center, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research."

5 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. TGDaily coverage by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    TG Daily is also covering this with more details, and has a picture tour of the current NCSA supercomputer facility.

  2. universities or IBM? by Will+the+Chill · · Score: 2, Informative

    I think that the NSF funds it, the universities get to run the research, and IBM gets to build the machine.

    http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/ 06/0547226

    -WtC

    *please insert sig for 2 more minutes*

    --
    Creator of RPerl, Scouter, Juggler, Mormon, Perl Monger, Serial Entrepreneur, Aspiring Astrophysicist, Community Organiz
  3. wow... by djupedal · · Score: 4, Informative

    "Infinite: Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some. Much bigger than that in fact, really amazingly immense, a totally stunning size, real "wow, that's big," time. Infinity is just so big that by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy. Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly huge is the sort of concept we're trying to get across here."

  4. Re:Are these machines actually used? by Minter92 · · Score: 3, Informative

    I worked as a system engineer on the supercomputers at NCSA from 97 till 2000. Once they are up and stable they are pretty much pushed to the limits. The users are constantly pushing for more procs, more memory, more storage. They'll use every flop they can get.

  5. Re:Are these machines actually used? by DegreeOfFreedom · · Score: 2, Informative

    In fact, a lattice QCD problem was one of the model problems for the Track 1 proposals. Proposers had to "provide a detailed analysis of the anticipated performance of the proposed system on the following set of model problems...A lattice-gauge QCD calculation in which 50 gauge configurations are generated on an 84^3*144 lattice with a lattice spacing of 0.06 fermi, the strange quark mass m_s set to its physical value, and the light quark mass m_l = 0.05*m_s. The target wall-clock time for this calculation is 30 hours." Full details here.

    This is a Big F-ing Problem that does in fact require Big F-ing Computers to solve. To meet the target time would require at least a petaflop of sustained performance; hence the inclusion of this problem in the call for proposals. The other model problems came from CFD and molecular dynamics, and there was a wide range of smaller required problems as well.

    Now, none of this explains how these machines will really be used, or to what end. Nevertheless, I can vouch for such large machines being used under heavy load to solve very large problems. Poke around any of the national supercomputing labs' websites, and you should be able to find at least plenty of news releases, if not papers.

    Here are some quick samples: