University Of Illinois To Get World's Fastest Public Supercomputer
The UIUC campus will one day become the home of IBM's Blue Water... likely to be the world's fastest supercomputer.
The National Science Foundation last week received approval from the National Science Board to create a $208 million supercomputer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The university's National Center for Supercomputing Applications, or NCSA, will be home of the IBM Blue Water, a supercomputer believed capable of a petaflop - one thousand trillion operations per second.
Researchers for the past several years have dreamed of creating a supercomputer that makes petascale computing a viable option.
The world's fastest supercomputer at the moment, IBM's Blue Gene/L, only has one third of the expected power of the Blue Water.
The university has already planned a number of uses for Blue Water. One of the UIUC priorities will be for the operations for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. Supercomputers often handle scientific research methods that include weather modeling, biophysics and biochemistry and computer science projects are several popular methods.
Construction on the supercomputer is expected to begin in the fall, but contractual negotiations must still be worked out. One looming problem is the building has the space requirements, but may not have the power requirements for Blue Water. Even though building a new location for the supercomputer is possible, the National Science Foundation would not fund the construction.
Expects completion of Blue Water sometime in 2011.
"The IBM Blue Gene/L, world's fastest supercomputer (Source: IBM)"
Source: University of Illinois
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