Blue Waters Supercomputer, The Fastest One To Be Installed At University Of Illinois

The long-planned Blue Waters supercomputer which took more about four years in development has entered into its installation process at the University of Illinois. The project is backed by National Science Foundation.
Seattle-based Cray Inc. took over construction of Blue Waters last November after IBM pulled out over cost and technical concerns.
Blue Waters is planned to operate at sustained speeds of a petaflop. That’s a thousand trillion operations a second, a long-sought standard that makes massive projects possible.
The supercomputer is built with more than 235 Cray XE6 cabinets, using AMD Opteron 6200 processors, and will also utilize more than 30 cabinets of an upcoming Cray XK6 computer with Nvidia Tesla GPUs.

Scientists hope to create breakthroughs in nearly all fields of science using Blue Waters. They will predict the behavior of complex biological systems, understand the facts regarding evolution of cosmos, design new materials at the atomic level, predict the behavior of hurricanes and tornadoes, and simulate complex engineered systems like the power distribution system and airplanes and automobiles.
Cray and the University of Illinois expect the computer to be complete by fall.

Source: etechmag.com