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Blue Waters – world’s first petascale supercomputer with processor of 200,000 cores and costs around $208 million

Those supercomputers used for hard science research are definitely out of our imagination about how powerful, speedy and how much they will cost.

The most recent one which has just got the green light, with the support of a grant worth $208 million, is to build a supercomputer called Blue Waters. If you’ve been thinking that those dual-core or quad-core processors of the servers in your office are super powerful, you’ll get a shock after hearing how many cores that the processor of the Blue Waters has.

The Blue Waters will feature a processor that has a whopping of 200,000 cores. And it will cost around $208 million. About the processing speed, memory and storage – It’ll have up to 2-petaflops processing speed, more than a petabyte (10¹⁵ bytes) of memory and a 10 petabyte disk storage system. All these are massive figures – the first supercomputer that is at the petascale.

The Blue Waters are to be built by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and its National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and they’ve finalized the contract with IBM to build the world’s first sustained petascale computational system.

The Blue Waters are great for hard science researches which need super high computational power such as simulating the Sun’s coronal mass ejections, studying black holes, and molecular biology. Blue Waters will come online in 2011, which should be accessible nationally, at campus-level.

via [gizmodo]

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