Blue Waters: An unsurpassed national asset

Blue Waters will be an unsurpassed national asset. The system will deliver sustained performance of one petaflop for many real-world scientific and engineering applications. Those are codes scientists and engineers use every day, not benchmarks. A petaflop is computing parlance for 1 quadrillion calculations per second. Blue Waters is supported by a $208 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

The configuration of Blue Waters was determined by assessing the needs of various grand challenge science and engineering problems. Based on input from the researchers who will use Blue Waters, the system will feature:

• Powerful cores, so fewer cores are required to achieve petascale performance.
• A high-performance interconnect, to facilitate scaling to large numbers of cores.
• A large, high-peformance memory subsystem, to enable the solution of memory-intensive problems.
• A high-performance I/O subsystem, to enable the solution of data-intensive problems.
• High reliability, to ensure that the most challenging problems can be addressed.

The system software is an equally critical part of the petascale environment. The software environment for Blue Waters is designed to ensure that applications can take full advantage of its hardware capabilities and achieve a high sustained performance on a broad range of applications as well as enhance the productivity of application developers and system administrators by providing convenient, integrated tools to analyze and control the behavior of the system.