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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. Yes, but the article doesn't address a few questio by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Redundant
    1. does it run Linux?
    2. has anyone contemplated creating a beowulf cluster of these things?
    3. will this, like a 115MPH fastball, obsolete all the other computers in the world in activities like first posting?
  2. But... by Light303 · · Score: 0, Redundant

    does it run Vista? ... oh wait!

  3. Imagine a... by bakedpatato · · Score: 0, Redundant

    oh never mind.