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IT University of Illinois to get World's Fastest Public Supercomputer
Michael Hoffman (Blog) - August 13, 2007 2:29 AM

21 comment(s) - last by dever.. on Aug 14 at 3:22 PM

The IBM Blue Gene/L, world's fastest supercomputer (Source: IBM)

The UIUC campus will one day become the home of IBM's Blue Water... likely to be the world's fastest supercomputer

The National Science Foundation last week received approval from the National Science Board to create a $208 million supercomputer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The university's National Center for Supercomputing Applications, or NCSA, will be home of the IBM Blue Water, a supercomputer believed capable of a petaflop - one thousand trillion operations per second.

Researchers for the past several years have dreamed of creating a supercomputer that makes petascale computing a viable option.

The world's fastest supercomputer at the moment, IBM's Blue Gene/L, only has one third of the expected power of the Blue Water.

The university has already planned a number of uses for Blue Water. One of the UIUC priorities will be for the operations for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. Supercomputers often handle scientific research methods that include weather modeling, biophysics and biochemistry and computer science projects are several popular methods.

Construction on the supercomputer is expected to begin in the fall, but contractual negotiations must still be worked out. One looming problem is the building has the space requirements, but may not have the power requirements for Blue Water. Even though building a new location for the supercomputer is possible, the National Science Foundation would not fund the construction.

Expects completion of Blue Water sometime in 2011.

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UIUC

By phatboye on 8/13/2007 3:18:58 AM , Rating: 2

By the time they build it there will be something else that will be faster.

It's nice to hear good things from my Alma Mater though.

RE: UIUC

By KristopherKubicki

(blog) on 8/13/2007 4:04:09 AM , Rating: 2

Same here :)

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RE: UIUC

By Lonyo on 8/13/2007 4:25:18 AM , Rating: 2

Yeah, but the new faster computer will take another 4 years to get sorted, so it's all good :P

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RE: UIUC

By PaxtonFettel on 8/13/2007 5:21:12 AM , Rating: 2

Ahhh, the wonderful cycle of progress.

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RE: UIUC

By NEOCortex on 8/13/2007 11:01:27 AM , Rating: 2

Sweet!

Too bad I have no reason to use this monster for my research...

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RE: UIUC

By Basilisk on 8/13/2007 4:53:47 PM , Rating: 2

Gee, shouldn't it be called Illiac VII??? :)

Ah, those Golden Years of UIUC Comp Sci., and the Illiac IV: intended for the UIUC campus, pending riots drove it off to Moffet AFB. Kent State trumped the planned UIUC Illiac IV riots, however; a few 'Guard sweeps of the Quad and a few speeches by radicals was all it came to. 'Don't imagine today's UIUC students would leave their dorms to riot over dARPA computers....

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one thousand trillion?

By miahallen on 8/13/2007 9:14:28 AM , Rating: 2

Don't you mean one quadrillion?

RE: one thousand trillion?

By incompleteunit on 8/13/2007 9:58:39 AM , Rating: 2

A quadrilli-wha? ;P

Maybe quadrillion hurts people's brains too much.

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RE: one thousand trillion?

By surt on 8/13/2007 1:38:41 PM , Rating: 2

The number of trillions has been the standard measure for a while. The transition to counting by number of quadrillions won't happen until computers with multiple quadrillions are competing against each other.

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RE: one thousand trillion?

By miahallen on 8/13/2007 3:41:21 PM , Rating: 2

Based on this logic, I suppose when systems first broke the trillion mark, it must have been referred to as one thousand billion ? When they first broke the billion mark, they must have said one thousand million ? And when the first broke the million mark, they probably said one thousand thousand , right?

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Virginia Tech's System X

By aliasfox on 8/13/2007 11:55:37 AM , Rating: 2

I remember nearly 4 years ago when Virginia Tech put together the "Big Mac" which debuted as 3rd fastest on the top 500 chart using off the shelf Power Mac G5s - assembled in a month using slave labor (i.e. college students that were fed pizza).

It now sits at #71 - I guess even supercomputer power is fleeting.

RE: Virginia Tech's System X

By Fahlcor on 8/13/2007 1:55:46 PM , Rating: 2

Could they not just build another one from current hardware?

I realize that some of these machines are built to compute specific tasks also but could it not be done by lots of smaller computers faster/cheaper such as SETI and those types of tasks? And now with the PS3 running cirlces around desktops with the CELL processor why not just do it that way as a distributed type task.

just my quarter

Fahlcor

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RE: Virginia Tech's System X

By Flunk on 8/13/2007 2:55:04 PM , Rating: 2

The Cell is really annoying to program for, at the moment generalised processors are what we need for supercomputing. Cell is better at clusters meant for a single purpose.

Plus if they really wanted pure gigaflops of specialized processing GPUs perform much better per watt and outperform the Cell (check folding at home stats)

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By conrad13a on 8/13/2007 3:05:38 AM , Rating: 2

I wonder what the rate of power draw is for a petaflop.

RE: ?

By masher2

(blog) on 8/13/2007 11:25:10 AM , Rating: 2

Well IIRC, Blue Gene/L uses something like 1.5 MW, so if this will likely somewhere between that and three times as much.

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years

By Silver2k7 on 8/13/2007 3:06:41 AM , Rating: 2

It looks like a large installment.. but 2011 it can't take years to install now can it =) ?

Are they are ordering it with CPUs only avalible in 2010 or 2011 ?

RE: years

By Tsuwamono on 8/13/07, Rating: -1

RE: years

By dever on 8/14/2007 3:22:48 PM , Rating: 1

Do you work for tigerdirect? After about 5 years of using Newegg, I've never had anything take more than two-four days... typically using thier cheapest shipping option. He should have called them up... they probably would have hand-delivered it had they known.

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big iron for a very important place

By rika13 on 8/13/2007 7:14:20 AM , Rating: 2

u of i has lots of defense research going on, and the invention of the web browser occurred there, one of the few things that makes me proud to be from illinois (our governor definitely is a mark of shame:( )