Innovation. Out of the Blue.

In 2007, the National Science Foundation approved a $208-million grant to fund the creation of the world’s most powerful, leadership-class supercomputer – Blue Waters. Capable of processing more than 13 quadrillion calculations per second, Blue Waters was in continuous operation from 2013 through 2021, providing more than 39 billion core hours to scientists and engineers around the world.

The Blue Waters legacy.

Three million times faster than your laptop, a Blue Waters project may have simulated the evolution of the cosmos, delved into fine-scale processes in molecular dynamics or anything in between. Blue Waters featured:

• More than 1.5 petabytes of memory, enough to store 300 million images from your digital camera
• More than 25 petabytes of disk storage, enough to store all of the printed documents in all of the world’s libraries
• Up to 500 petabytes of tape storage, enough to store 10 percent of all of the words spoken in the existence of humankind