Items tagged with Blue Waters
Desktops may be losing steam as the segment gives way in some part to more mobile machines, but oddly, the largest desktops of all are seeing a huge uptick in attention. Supercomputers far and wide are becoming all the rage at institutions and educational facilities, as the world looks to plow more into science and computational black holes by using giant, always-on computers to handle the dirty work. Today, the Blue Waters supercomputer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign entered production, meaning the behemoth capable of performing quadrillions of calculations every second and working with quadrillions of bytes of data is now crunching numbers around the clock to help scientists...
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Last month, we discussed the split between IBM and the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) over the highly ambitious 'Blue Waters' project. Blue Waters was the name of a planned supercomputer that would've been entirely water-cooled and included as many as 524,288 CPU cores. The disintegration of the deal came as some surprise, given the amount of work that'd already been done on the project. New details have come to light on why the University of Illinois and IBM ultimately parted ways over the project. One of the major issues appear to have been the clock speeds of the CPUs. The project selected IBM in 2007 as the supercomputer vendor for the Blue Waters project based on...
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Four years ago almost to the day, the National Science Board handed the National science Foundation a mandate to build the most powerful petaflop-class supercomputer in the world. The NSF announced in turn that the system would be based on IBM's Power7 processor technology. One of the features that won IBM the contract was the fact that the cluster doesn't require message passing and could theoretically be programmed as a single system. As of today, Blue Waters is officially canceled. The news comes less than a month after IBM announced it would begin commercial shipments of the individual nodes that were originally supposed to make up the building blocks of the Blue Waters system. The MCM modules...
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