Illinois applications to use Blue Waters are due by March 16

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are invited to apply by March 16 to use the powerful Blue Waters supercomputer. There will be a Q&A sessions from 3 to 5 pm March 5 in room 1040 of the NCSA Building for faculty and staff who are considering submitting proposals.

Blue Waters is one of the world’s most powerful computing systems. Each year, 3-4 million node-hours will be allocated to projects from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As each node has many powerful cores, this is significantly more computing power than most universities have available for their use, and this resource provides Illinois faculty, staff, and students with a unique opportunity to perform groundbreaking work in computational science. [System details are available at https://bluewaters.ncsa.illinois.edu/hardware-summary.]

These allocations are intended for problems that need the unique capabilities of Blue Waters at large scale, which need not be just floating‐point speed; it could be total memory, data size or data bandwidth, or even computational scale. Project proposals are expected to demonstrate that no other resource would be suitable for a given problem, as Blue Waters is not merely a large source of compute cycles.

Illinois faculty and staff can apply now for both exploratory projects, intended to enable them to prepare a code for Blue Waters, and general allocations, intended for large-scale research projects. A typical exploratory proposal will request 20,000-50,000 node hours, which will permit a few short tests at full machine scale as well as time for testing at smaller scales. A typical general proposal will be for 30,000-1 million node hours.

Proposals will be judged on their scientific and/or educational merit, their suitability for Blue Waters, and their demonstrated need for the unique capabilities of Blue Waters.

For complete instructions on how to apply, see https://bluewaters.ncsa.illinois.edu/illinois-allocations. Proposals should be submitted via EasyChair:

• Submit Exploratory Proposals
• Submit General Proposals

Note, Illinois faculty and staff can also apply to use Blue Waters for courses, workshops, and other educational purposes. Applications for educational allocations are accepted on an ongoing basis, with no fixed deadlines. For details, visit https://bluewaters.ncsa.illinois.edu/education-allocations.

Questions? Contact the Blue Waters Project Office at help+bw@ncsa.illinois.edu.

Disclaimer: Due to changes in website systems, we've adjusted archived content to fit the present-day site and the articles will not appear in their original published format. Formatting, header information, photographs and other illustrations are not available in archived articles.