Blue Waters and Stampede Supercomputing Power Unleashed for Research by National Science Foundation

April 19, 2013- Blue Waters, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, was recently declared open for research by The National Science Foundation (NSF) to enable researchers to investigate challenging and heretofore impossible problems.

With "peak performance of nearly 12 quadrillion floating point operations per second," Blue Waters "has demonstrated sustained system performance of more than one petaflop on a range of commonly-used science and engineering applications."

"Blue Waters is an example of a high-risk, high-reward research infrastructure project that will enable NSF to achieve its mission of funding basic research at the frontiers of science," said NSF Acting Director Cora Marrett. "Its impact on science and engineering discoveries and innovation, as well as on national priorities, such as health, safety and well-being, will be extraordinary."

Over 30 science and engineering teams have been allocated time on Blue Waters since it was first made available in a "friendly-user mode" in March, 2012. Research advancements have include elementary particle physics; molecules and materials; tornadoes and climate change; cosmology; modeling the HIV genome; and flood assessment, drought monitoring, and resource management, to name just a few.

A partnership of NSF, the State of Illinois, the University of Illinois and the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation, Blue Waters is located at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

A second NSF-supported supercomputing system, Stampede at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin, was formally declared available for research shortly after Blue Waters.

Read the full release here. Elsewhere, the NSF discusses Advances in Computational Research Transform Scientific Process and Discovery.

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