About the Blue Waters project

Blue Waters News

Jan. 30, 2012: Blue Waters "Early Science System" delivered to NCSA

View a live video feed of the floor at the National Petascale Computing Facility

Nov. 14, 2011: NCSA, Cray partner on sustained-petascale Blue Waters supercomputer

The Blue Waters project will deliver a supercomputer capable of sustained performance of 1 petaflop on a range of real-world science and engineering applications. It is expected to be one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.

Scientists will create breakthroughs in nearly all fields of science using Blue Waters. They will predict the behavior of complex biological systems, understand how the cosmos evolved after the Big Bang, design new materials at the atomic level, predict the behavior of hurricanes and tornadoes, and simulate complex engineered systems like the power distribution system and airplanes and automobiles.

Blue Waters will be composed of more than 235 Cray XE6 cabinets based on the recently announced AMD Opteron™ 6200 Series processor (formerly code-named "Interlagos") and more than 30 cabinets of a future version of the recently announced Cray XK6 supercomputer with NVIDIA® Tesla™ GPU computing capability.

The Blue Waters project also includes a far-reaching educational and workforce development program. It will impact students from K-12 through postgraduate education, reaching out to geographical areas and communities that have been historically underrepresented in supercomputing. At the undergraduate level, the program will educate the next generation of graduate students, K-12 teachers, future technical staff, and the informed public. At the graduate and postgraduate levels, the program will educate and train the next generation of researchers.

An expanded industrial partner program is an integral part of the Blue Waters project. Members of the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation will work with their business and industry partners to introduce them to the world of petascale computing, giving industrial outreach a truly national scale.