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$208 Million Petascale Computer Gets Green Light

Posted by samzenpus on from the that's-a-lot-of-solitaire dept.

coondoggie writes "The 200,000 processor core system known as Blue Waters got the green light recently as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and its National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) said it has finalized the contract with IBM to build the world's first sustained petascale computational system. Blue Waters is expected to deliver sustained performance of more than one petaflop on many real-world scientific and engineering applications. A petaflop equals about 1 quadrillion calculations per second. They will be coupled to more than a petabyte of memory and more than 10 petabytes of disk storage. All of that memory and storage will be globally addressable, meaning that processors will be able to share data from a single pool exceptionally quickly, researchers said. Blue Waters, is supported by a $208 million grant from the National Science Foundation and will come online in 2011."

3 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. Star Trek "Data" rated at 60 Teraflops by peter303 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I just saw The Measure of a Man episode on the Star Trek Labor Day marathon. Data has a speed of 60 Teraflops and 100 petabytes of storage. That used to seem large in the late 1980s. (Episode were Data goes on trial whether he is a machine or sentient.)

  2. Re:Naive question... by serviscope_minor · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I don't use one myself, but I know people involved with supercomptuers. They are used for large simulations. Often this comes down to solving large systems of linear equations, since at the inner step finite elements need solutions to these large equation systems. The point is, the larger the computer the larger the grid you can have. This involves simulating a larger volume, or simulating the same volume in more detail (think, for example of weather systems).

    As for concrete advancemants? I'm not in the biz, so I don't know, but I expect so. Apparently they're also used for stellar simulations, so I expect the knowledge of the universe has been advanced. I would be suprised if they haven't seen duty in global warming simulation too.

    --
    SJW n. One who posts facts.
  3. Re:Naive question... by Ilgaz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Did you know that a very credible FAQ mentions Apple purchased a Cray for manufacturing/design and someone actually saw them emulate MacOS on that monster?

    http://www.spikynorman.dsl.pipex.com/CrayWWWStuff/Cfaqp3.html#TOC23

    I bet they tried some games too :)