Advancing science, helping society

The computing power provided by Blue Waters will allow U.S. scientists to make extraordinary leaps in knowledge and discovery—provided their scientific and engineering codes can take full advantage of the system's hundreds of thousands of processor cores. The Blue Waters partners will collaborate with scientists on porting, revising and rewriting, and optimizing the performance and scalability of existing applications as well as developing new applications that describe increasingly complex natural and engineered systems.

Starting in 2008 and continuing throughout the project, the National Science Foundation will award Petascale Computing Resource Allocations. These awards enable application teams to work closely with the Blue Waters project team in preparing their codes to take full advantage of petascale resources.

The Blue Waters Project is taking a disciplined approach to enable the development of a broad range of science and engineering applications for Blue Waters. Four interconnected efforts have been established:

• Consulting Office. Consulting services will be provided to prospective users of the Blue Waters system to enable them to better prepare their applications for its arrival.
• Petascale Application Collaboration Teams. PACTs will be formed for selected science and engineering applications to port, optimize and scale them for Blue Waters. PACTs will provide computing experts to work closely with the developers of the selected applications.
• Application and Training Workshops. Workshops will be held at least twice per year and will include presentations and discussions on topics relevant to the development of codes for efficient execution on petascale computers with a focus on Blue Waters.
• Application Development Environment. A rich set of tools will be integrated into an Application Development Environment to support the creation of scalable, high performance science and engineering applications, including debuggers, compilers, libraries and frameworks.