Computing system

Blue Waters will deliver sustained performance of 1 petaflop (1 quadrillion calculations every second) for many science and engineering applications. That's not on benchmarks—that's for real codes that researchers use every day.

The configuration of Blue Waters was determined by assessing the needs of various grand challenge science and engineering problems. Based on input from researchers, the system will feature:

• Powerful cores with 12 execution units, so fewer cores are required to achieve petascale performance.
• A new high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnect, to facilitate scaling to large numbers of cores.
• A high-peformance eight-channel memory subsystem, to enable the solution of memory-intensive problems.
• A high-performance I/O subsystem, to enable the solution of data-intensive problems.
• High reliability, to ensure that the most challenging problems can be addressed.

Blue Waters is based on POWER7 hardware and a powerful new system design from IBM. The base system and computing environment will be enhanced through a multi-year collaboration among NCSA, the University of Illinois, IBM, and members of the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation. The enhanced environment will increase the productivity of application developers, system administrators, and researchers by providing an integrated toolset to use Blue Waters and analyze and control its behavior.

This configuration will be:

• Very powerful, with a number of applications capable of achieving more than one petaflop of performance.
• Effective, with researchers able to get the results they need when they need them.
• Reliable, with the system running 24 hours a day, seven days a week and recovering from hardware failures without losing data or halting calculations.
• Consistent, delivering accurate results and completing jobs in the promised and expected amount of time.