Illinois Petascale Computing Facility

The state-of-the-art 88,000-square-foot Petascale Computing Facility will be built at the corner of Oak Street and St. Mary's Road on the University of Illinois' south campus to house Blue Waters and other NCSA infrastructure, as well as nearly 40 staff members. The facility's 20,000-square-foot machine room will be large enough to simultaneously accommodate both the initial system and a follow-on system. It will combine top-flight physical and cybersecurity with the open, collaborative research attitudes of a public institution.

"We're committed to ensuring that researchers, educators, and students all have access to this extraordinary resource," says NCSA Director Thom Dunning. "NCSA has pursued this philosophy of open access for more than 21 years, and has provided computing power to thousands of people across the country, while still maintaining high standards for security."

Energy efficiency is an integral part of the Blue Waters project and the Petascale Computing Facility. The design of the facility will:

• Achieve at least standard LEED certification, with LEED Silver certification as the goal.
• Rely heavily on more efficient water cooling for the systems it houses.
• Take advantage of an on-site tower to chill water for cooling the compute systems. This will reduce energy consumption by using nature's natural cooling power to chill water during the cold winter months.
• Use computational fluid dynamics models to precisely design the interior of the building to maximize the efficiency of the air conditioning system for air-cooled computing systems.
• Take advantage of the campus' highly reliable electricity supply, avoiding the need for the standard back-up Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS). Eliminating the UPS saves equipment costs, minimizes floor space used, and increases energy efficiency because systems that employ a UPS convert AC to DC and back, incurring substantial energy losses.

The project budget for the Petascale Computing Facility is $72.5 million; Illinois' governor has committed to $60 million of those costs.

Groundbreaking for the facility is expected in late 2008, with completion in the fall of 2010.