$208 Million Petascale Computer System Gets Green Light
$208 Million Petascale Computer System Gets Green Light
Posted 09/15/2008 at 12:42pm
| by Paul Lilly
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Forget about dual, quad, or even eight-core processors, all of which would prove woefully inadequate next to the system being called Blue Waters. The 200,000 processor core supercomputer got the green light at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, finalizing a contract with IBM to build the what will be the world's first sustained petascale computational system.
For anyone not up on their flops, a petaflop is the equivalent to roughly 1 quadrillion calculations per second, presumably just enough to get a decent framerate out of Crysis. Coupled with the 200,000 processor cores will be more than a petabyte of memory and more than 10 petabytes of disk storage. And yes, that would hold a lot of porn, though Blue Waters will spend its time on scintillating real-world scientific and engineering applications.
Specifically, the National Science Foundations says that Blue Waters will wade into the study of complex processes like the interaction of the Sun's coronal mass ejections with the Earth's magnetosphere and ionosphere. Other examples include the formation and evolution of galaxies in the early universe, understanding the chains of reactions that occur with livings cells, the design of novel materials, and other decidedly nerd topics that have nothing to do with propelling Folding at Home team 11108 ahead of the competition.
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Shalbatana
September 16, 2008 at 5:43pm
Well written Paul!!!
_______________________________
"There's no time like the future."
Keith E. Whisman
September 15, 2008 at 11:22pm
And it's going to use Intel Extreme Graphics for Video.
nsvander
September 15, 2008 at 5:29pm
Can I borrow that thing for a day or two so that I can run folding on it. I would love to see my score with a couple of 1 million point days in there.
Keith E. Whisman
September 15, 2008 at 4:53pm
You guys are all wrong. They are building this to try to get playable frame rates on Crysis on super high resolution on all Ultra High settings.
Only time will tell if it works... Only time will tell. It's money well spent if it works though.
Cabal468
September 15, 2008 at 3:00pm
I thought I saw some people carrying a really nice petaflop computer while I was driving around in ChamBana the other night.[For those of you not from Champaign, Chambana is short for Champaign and it's neighbor Urbana. Urbana starts immediately where the UofI campus stops...Now ya know! :-D)
musicman172001
September 15, 2008 at 4:39pm
The campus doesn't end at Urbana.....the two cities split the campus in 2.
Anywho, as a grad student at UIUC I'm surprised I haven't heard about this from the campus itself. I'm sure they're getting funding from elsewhere besides the state but it's disappointing they can't use that much money for something a bit more useful. The University has a bunch of other things they could use that kind of money for, especially since the past two years have been a pain getting a budget approved by the state.
sirphunkee
September 15, 2008 at 7:39pm
www.haarp.alaska.edu = great stuff (my dad has contributed to the project)
www.haarp.net = hilarious stuff (in a "you don't have to pay your income tax!" sorta way)
XiXVenomXiX
September 15, 2008 at 1:01pm
208 million dollars to find out about the sun? Was cancer cured or something because I didn't get the memo.
PhynaeusClaw
September 17, 2008 at 3:09am
Did the sun stop existing as the origin of 99% of Earth's energy? Can coronal mass ejections take out entire power grids and fry your precious PC?
Nope.
Yup.
QED.
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