The University of Chicago has received a $91,000 grant to help research collaborators across the nation prepare their proposals for petascale computing projects on Blue Waters, which is expected to be the world’s most powerful supercomputer for open scientific research when it begins operation in at the University of Illinois in 2011.
The grant is part of a supplement of $775,000 in funding from the National Science Foundation to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Leading the effort to increase the quantity and quality of proposals for Petascale Resource Computing Allocations for Blue Waters will be Daniel Katz, a senior computational researcher and high-performance computing/grid consultant at UChicago’s Computation Institute. PRAC awards are a prerequisite for receiving time on Blue Waters through the NSF.
Blue Waters will enable scientists and engineers to perform quadrillions of calculations every second, providing the power they need to solve some of their most challenging problems. The supercomputer’s processing power is measured in petaflops (a thousand trillion floating point operations per second). It would take one million laptop computers operating in concert to attain one petaflop.
Blue Waters is a joint effort of UIUC, NCSA, IBM, and the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation.
—Prof. Chuan He
