Installation of Blue Waters Petaflop Supercomputer Begins

Posted by Unknown on Monday January 30, 2012 @12:15PM from the too-many-flops-to-fail dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois is finally getting the troubled Blue Waters supercomputer installed. After IBM walked away from the project after 3 years of planning, Cray stepped in to pick up the $188 million contract. Now, in around 9 months time, Blue Waters should be fully operational and achieve performance of 1 petaflop or more. As for the hardware... who wouldn't want access to 235 Cray XE6 cabinets using AMD 16 core Opteron 2600 processors with access to 1.5 petabytes of memory (4GB per chip) and 500 petabytes of local storage."

2 of 86 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Typo by reking2 · 2012-01-30 13:08 · Score: 5, Informative

Please correct "Opteron 2600" to "Opteron 6200". There are no 2600 series chips from AMD.
Re:When can I get one on my desktop? by SrLnclt · 2012-01-30 13:57 · Score: 5, Informative

The University of Illinois generates much of their own power, and has relatively low electric rates because of this. This year the rates are posted as $0.0754/KWh. Its also doubtful they will be operating continuously at peak capacity.

And on a related note, the building housing Blue Waters has been certified LEED Gold by the USGBC in an effort to minimize the energy and cost impact of operating the new facility.