PERCS

The Blue Waters sustained-petascale computing system is based on the most advanced technologies under development at IBM, including an advanced processor and memory subsystem, a new interconnect, parallel file system, operating system, programming environment, and system administration tools. These technologies are embodied in the PERCS system design (Productive, Easy-to-use, Reliable Computing System).

Blue Waters is supported by the National Science Foundation. It leverages the investment made by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) program, which is supporting the development of PERCS. Blue Waters will be the first production deployment of PERCS technologies, 100 times more powerful than today's general purpose supercomputers but dramatically simpler to use.

IBM, the University of Illinois, NCSA, and the rest of the Blue Waters team will work together throughout Blue Waters' lifespan. The team is enhancing IBM's high-performance computing environment to ensure that applications can take full advantage of Blue Waters and achieve high sustained performance. The enhanced high-performance computing environment will also increase the productivity of applications developers, system administrators, and researchers by providing an integrated toolkit for using, analyzing, monitoring, and controlling Blue Waters.