Blue Waters
From U of I Wiki
Blue Waters is the name of the supercomputer that the Urbana-Champaign campus's National Center for Supercomputing Applications is scheduled to build.
The National Science Board is expected to award the center $208 million to create the supercomputer. It will be capable of calculating 1,000 trillion calculations per second, known as the "petascale barrier." That calculation rate is 500 times more powerful than the super computers of 2008.
Blue Waters is expected to analyze astronomical and biological data, and is scheduled to go online in 2011.
Dr. Thomas Dunning will direct Blue Waters' operation in conjunction with industry partners in the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation and IBM.
Construction for Blue Water Data Processing Center, the building that will house Blue Waters, started on November 5, 2008. The center will be on the northwest corner of Oak Street and St. Mary's Road in Champaign. The center will cost $72.5 million in state funds and cover 95,000 square feet. It will also meet LEED silver certification. The room in which Blue Waters sits will be large and open with tall ceilings, and lined with rows of refrigerator-sized boxes and some blinking lights.
