Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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. I approve by weak* · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'm glad we have the NSF out there supporting the development of faster and faster supercomputers. Pretty soon these machines will be able to locate the correct Sarah Connor in the phone book on the first try.

    --
    The Schwartz space ain't from Spaceballs.
  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:If anyone makes a Terminator joke by locster · · Score: 3, Funny

    Ahh what the heck - A terminator walks into a bar... barman: Why the mimetic polyalloy face? terminator: I'm a T-1000 terminator from the future sent to kill Sarah Conner.

  5. 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.