Blue waters
The
200,000 processor core system known as Blue Waters is being built by the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and its National Centre for
Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).
According to a press release, the
contract with IBM will be to build the world's first sustained petascale
computer. Blue Waters is expected to deliver sustained performance of more
than one petaflop on many real-world scientific and engineering applications.
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 will come online in 2011.
The system will be
used to study complex processes like the interaction of the Sun's coronal mass
ejections with the Earth's magnetosphere and ionosphere. Also down to be looked
at are the formation and evolution of galaxies in the early universe and
understanding the reactions that occur with living cells. It will also be used
to design of new materials.
