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Deadline extended: Spring 2018 Illinois allocations on Blue Waters


The deadline to apply for an Illinois Allocation on NCSA’s Blue Waters supercomputer has been extended until Thursday, March 22nd. If you’re an Illinois researcher who is seeking time on a robust high-performance computing system, more information on how to apply can be found below:

Blue Waters is one of the world’s most powerful computing systems, located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and housed at the National Petascale Computing Facility. Each year that Blue Waters is in operation, about 6 to 8 million node-hours are available for projects originating from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign via Illinois Allocations. As each node has many powerful cores, Illinois possesses significantly more computing power than most universities have available for staff use, and this can provide University research faculty and staff with a unique opportunity to perform groundbreaking, computationally laborious research.

Proposal submission for the Spring 2018 round of allocations has been extended from March 15 to March 22, 2018.

Faculty or staff for whom Illinois is their home institution by primary appointment affiliation are eligible to submit an Illinois allocation proposal as Principal Investigator. This includes postdoctoral fellows or postdoctoral research associates. Registered graduate or undergraduate students are not eligible to apply as Principal Investigators due to administrative requirements regarding appointment status but are encouraged to apply if their faculty or staff advisor will agree to be Principal Investigator on the proposal.

Visiting faculty or external adjunct faculty for whom Illinois is not their primary home institution are eligible to apply as Principal Investigators if, for the period covered by the proposal request: i) Illinois will be their primary (majority) place of residence; and: ii) and they will hold appointments at Illinois during this period. All proposals can include co-PIs and collaborators from other institutions.

For questions about submitting a request contact the Blue Waters Project Office at help+bw@ncsa.illinois.edu or go to https://bluewaters.ncsa.illinois.edu/illinois-allocations.

About NCSA

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign provides supercomputing and advanced digital resources for the nation’s science enterprise. At NCSA, University of Illinois faculty, staff, students, and collaborators from around the globe use advanced digital resources to address research grand challenges for the benefit of science and society. NCSA has been advancing one third of the Fortune 50® for more than 30 years by bringing industry, researchers, and students together to solve grand challenges at rapid speed and scale.

About Blue Waters

Blue Waters is one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. Located at the University of Illinois, it can complete more than 1 quadrillion calculations per second on a sustained basis and more than 13 times that at peak speed. The peak speed is almost 3 million times faster than the average laptop. Blue Waters is supported by the National Science Foundation and the University of Illinois; NCSA manages the Blue Waters project and provides expertise to help scientists and engineers take full advantage of the system for their research.

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