For all NCSA news, go to http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/News/.
Details of Blue Waters start to emerge
According to William Kramer, deputy project director for Blue Waters, both the project and the system design are dedicated to providing performance, effectiveness, reliability, consistency and usability to the widest range of science and engineering areas.
Release date: 2009-11-12
Doing the best
Since the National Science Foundation gave the nod to build Blue Waters—a sustained petascale computer for open scientific research—NCSA, the University of Illinois, IBM, and partners around the country have been collaborating on the machine and a facility to house it. Building the two simultaneously has afforded unprecedented opportunities for synergy between machine and facility. Access' Barbara Jewett chatted with IBM Fellow Ed Seminaro, chief architect for Power HPC servers at IBM, about this synergy as well as some of the unique aspects of the Blue Waters project.
Release date: 2009-11-12
Leaving the dark days
As part of the Petascale Computing Resource Allocations program, a longtime NCSA collaborator and his team will make the improvements needed to run a popular cosmology simulation code on Blue Waters.
Release date: 2009-11-12
Great Lakes Consortium to host informational meeting at SC09
Release date: 2009-11-11
NCSA to host SC09 BOF on the Blue Waters allocation process
Release date: 2009-11-02
NSF provides additional funding for Blue Waters project
Release date: 2009-10-26
NCSA and Blue Waters team partner with new Petascale Computing Resource Allocation winners
Release date: 2009-10-15
Behind Blue Waters, volume 6
NCSA's John Melchi highlights progress made on the Illinois Petascale Computing Facility, focusing on the energy efficiency of the building's electrical system. The Petascale Computing Facility will house Blue Waters, the world's first sustained-petascale supercomputer for open scientific research.
Release date: 2009-09-29
Behind Blue Waters, volume 5
NCSA's Bob Fiedler talks about scaling up scientific codes to run on the massive Blue Waters supercomputer by working with those codes' developers. He also discusses the National Science Foundation's Petascale Computing Resource Allocations program, which supports these efforts.
Release date: 2009-09-16
Getting viral
Some early prospective users of Blue Waters will build computing code for global epidemic models.
Release date: 2009-09-01
Exciting times as applications are allocated to Blue Waters
Release date: 2009-08-25
Behind Blue Waters, volume 4
Brett Bode, software development manager for the Blue Waters project, discusses making it easier for researchers to move their scientific codes from other systems to the sustained-petascale supercomputer. He also talks about some of the new programming models that may be used for codes running on Blue Waters and partner institutions' work on performance tuning and software development models.
Release date: 2009-07-14
LSST-NCSA: A Partnership to Change the Way Science is Done
Release date: 2009-07-06
Behind Blue Waters, volume 3
Senior Associate Director John Melchi gives a tour of the Illinois Petascale Computing Facility. This state-of-the-art data center will be home to Blue Waters -- the world's first sustained-petascale supercomputer for open scientific research -- and to future extreme-scale systems for decades to come.
Release date: 2009-06-30
Blue Waters partner wins scaling award
Release date: 2009-05-26
Behind Blue Waters, volume 2
Deputy Project Director Bill Kramer discusses NCSA and Illinois' long-term collaboration with IBM. That work will improve the software that runs on the Blue Waters sustained-petascale supercomputer and helps make up the open-source environment that runs on other large-scale systems.
Release date: 2009-05-19
Deadline is May 18 to apply for two free computational skills summer schools
Release date: 2009-04-28
Behind Blue Waters
Deputy Project Director Bill Kramer describes working with scientists and engineers around the country on Blue Waters and talks about how new research teams can get involved. These relationships will help make Blue Waters the first supercomputer to achieve sustained-petaflops performance on a range of scientific research when the system comes online in 2011.
Release date: 2009-04-28
Ready on day 1
To ensure that scientists and engineers can achieve sustained petaflop performance on Blue Waters from day one, intensive work is under way now to port, optimize, and scale a range of applications to effectively use the system's more than 200,000 processors. Scientists and engineers who use these applications are working closely with computing experts, including staff from IBM, through Petascale Application Collaboration Teams (PACTs) to achieve this unprecedented level of performance.
Release date: 2009-04-15
A stimulating test of abilities
The National Science Foundation (NSF) outlined several science and engineering problems that a sustained petascale computer should address when it issued the solicitation for Blue Waters. Through the PACTs, scientists and engineers who use these applications are working closely with computing experts to address the specific challenges outlined by NSF, as well as other computational problems at this large scale. Lessons learned in optimizing one application will be applied to others as appropriate.
Release date: 2009-04-15
Building toward Blue Waters
NCSA has several systems that are being used as stepping stones for the sustained petaflop system that will come online in 2011.
Release date: 2009-04-15
Graduate students can gain computational skills at two summer schools
Release date: 2009-03-17
Proposals sought for Undergraduate Petascale Education Program
Release date: 2009-02-12
NCSA sponsors panel, showcases visualizations at AAAS
Release date: 2009-02-02
Illinois breaks ground on new Petascale Computing Facility
The University of Illinois held a groundbreaking ceremony for the $72.5 million Illinois Petascale Computing Facility on Nov. 5, 2008. Work on the 88,000-square-foot building that will house the Blue Waters sustained-petaflop supercomputer is under way at the corner of Oak Street and St. Mary's Road in Champaign.
Release date: 2008-11-25
Blue Waters: Keeping the focus on productivity
NCSA deputy director Rob Pennington discusses the Blue Waters project, which will build and deploy a computing system capable of delivering performance of 1 petaflop (1 quadrillion calculations per second) on a range of science and engineering applications.
Release date: 2008-11-18
William Kramer joins Blue Waters team at NCSA
Release date: 2008-11-13
NCSA workshop helps researchers prepare codes for Blue Waters
Release date: 2008-10-22
Building the data center of the future
Release date: 2008-10-07
Staying Competitive Through HPC: A National HPC Center Perspective
NCSA's director gives a perspective on "Staying Competitive Through High-Performance Computing," discussing the speed-ups possible with new technologies and the role NCSA's Blue Waters system will play in the petascale era.
Release date: 2008-09-16
Blue Waters to be featured on Big 10 Network
NCSA has produced a half-hour documentary on the Blue Waters project
that will appear on the Big 10 Network. "Blue Waters: Supercomputing
and Science" presents the history of high-performance computers at
Illinois, their future in systems like Blue Waters, and their impact
on society. For scheduling, see: http://www.bigtennetwork.com/schedule/.
Release date: 2008-09-04
Blue Waters: Supercomputing and Science
The National Science Foundation selected the University of Illinois, NCSA, IBM and partners around the country to build Blue Waters, the most-powerful computer for open scientific research.
Release date: 2008-09-02
University of Illinois, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, IBM, and partners to build first sustained petascale system for open scientific research
Release date: 2008-08-27
Students gain skills at first Virtual School summer school
Release date: 2008-08-27
Blue Waters: Changing the way science is done
Until about the middle of the last century, science was really founded on two major premises. One was work in the laboratory, referred to as experiment; the other was work on discovering the underlying principles, theory. With the development of electronic computers in the 1950s, scientists began to realize there was actually a third mode of investigating the world around us: computational modeling.
Release date: 2008-08-11
The best things constantly change
With the National Science Foundation's funding of a sustained-petascale computer system, called Blue Waters, the high-performance computing community embraces on new challenges. Access' Barbara Jewett discussed some of the hardware and software issues with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Wen-mei Hwu, professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Marc Snir, director of the Illinois Informatics Institute and former head of the university's computer science department.
Release date: 2008-08-11
Powering new discoveries
Researchers describe how the power of Blue Waters will advance their fields.
Release date: 2008-08-11
Simple, really
A nationwide team of collaborators, embodied in the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation, will back the Blue Waters petascale computing project.
Release date: 2008-08-11
Historic proportions
If history is any guide, Blue Waters will be a unique national asset for scientists around the country.
Release date: 2008-08-11
Infusing petascale thinking
Just as a petascale computer will dramatically change the world of high-performance computing, it also will set the education arena on its edge. Petascale computing will transform how computing as well as math and science are taught, from revamped materials to new courses to a virtual school.
Release date: 2008-07-08
Great leaps forward
How will petascale computing advance science and engineering? These researchers describe how their work will be transformed by the increased power that is on the horizon.
Release date: 2007-10-30
National Science Board Approves Funds for Petascale Computing Systems
Release date: 2007-08-07
