Blue Waters
| Company type | Supercomputer project |
|---|---|
| Industry | High-performance computing |
| Founded | 2007 |
| Founder | National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) |
| Headquarters | Urbana-Champaign , United States |
Area served | Scientific and engineering research |
Key people | National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) |
| Products | Petascale supercomputer |
| Parent | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign |
Blue Waters was a petascale supercomputer managed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. On August 8, 2007, the National Science Board approved funding through the National Science Foundation to acquire and deploy what was envisioned as the world's most powerful leadership-class supercomputer, allocating $208 million for the Blue Waters initiative.
In August 2011, IBM ended its hardware agreement and returned payments made. Following this, Cray Inc. secured a $188 million contract with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to construct the supercomputer, which was installed progressively throughout 2012. Blue Waters remained operational until December 31, 2021, after which it was replaced by the Delta system in April 2022.
Performance
Blue Waters delivered sustained performance of at least one petaFLOPS while running scientific and engineering applications. It was equipped with over 1.5 PB of memory, exceeded 25 PB in disk storage capacity, and supported up to 500 PB of tape storage. The system utilized the Cray Lustre parallel file system, offering bandwidths in the terabytes-per-second range, and connected through 300 Gbit/s wide area network links.
Facility
The National Petascale Computing Facility was built at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to accommodate Blue Waters' extensive infrastructure alongside other NCSA computing, networking, and data resources. This facility includes a dedicated machine room and has achieved LEED Gold certification. It integrates the university's campus-wide water cooling system with supplementary cooling towers that take advantage of Illinois' cold winter climate to minimize energy consumption. Employing advanced fluid dynamics modeling in its design, the center reaches an estimated energy efficiency between 85% and 90%, greatly exceeding the approximate 40% efficiency typical of large-scale data centers.