The US National Science Board (NSB) has approved $208 million in funding over four and a half years to build the world’s most powerful supercomputer, Blue Waters, which will be capable of performing more than one quadrillion operations per second, or a “petaflop” in supercomputing terms.

NSB, which serves as the governing board for the National Science Foundation (NSF), has given the foundation the go ahead to proceed with the purchase of the system.

NSF Deputy Director Kathy Olsen, said in a statement: “Working at the frontiers of knowledge is increasing the demand for powerful cyberinfrastructure. The petaflop computer will give U.S. scientists and engineers access to unprecedented petascale computing resources that will allow them to ask and answer complex questions we haven’t even dreamed of.”

Blue Waters is expected to go live in 2011 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Its presence is expected to draw more scientists to the campus.

The supercomputer will be used to focus on major problems, such as global warming, that require more computing power than what is available on today’s supercomputers.

At present, the world’s fastest supercomputer, IBM’s Blue Gene/L, has only about a third of the new system’s expected capability while the National Computer Science Academy’s (NCSA) fastest existing supercomputer, Abe, has less than a tenth of the processing power.

NSB also approved the funding of $65 million for a second supercomputer capable of performing nearly 1,000 trillion calculations per second. The five-year project will be located at the University of Tennessee, which is intended to bridge the gap between Blue Waters and the existing supercomputers.

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Entry was posted on Saturday, August 11th, 2007 at 11:48 pm under Technology.

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