Blue Waters Project Expands With NVIDIA GPU-Laden Cray Supercomputer

This week NVIDIA is letting loose more than one story on how they'll be inside some of the world's most powerful computers coming up soon, the latest being an Cray supercomputer deployed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications to move forward the Blue Waters project. And what is the Blue Waters project, you might want to know? Blue Waters is a project which aims at creating one of the world's most powerful computer systems, to put it simply, and with NVIDIA Tesla GPUs under the hood, this new Cray supercomputer is set to do the job.

The slightly more specific goal of the Blue Waters project is to deploy a supercomputer that's capable of working on a "diverse range of real-world science and engineering applications" at a sustained performance of one petaflop. Scientists and engineers across the USA will benefit from the eventual products of this initiative, and the whole project is supported by the National Science Foundation at the University of Illinois. NVIDIA chief technology officer of Tesla GPUs Steve Scott had the following to say on the situation:

NCSA has seized this opportunity to make Blue Waters into an even more amazing scientific computing instrument than originally planned. The performance and wide access of Blue Waters will enable the scientific community to accelerate the race for better science." – Scott

Cray system's general purpose CPUs will work side by side with NVIDIA's Tesla-brand GPUs and will accelerate compute-intensive applications across the board. This newest Blue Waters system will be an ultra-powerful hybrid supercomputer consisting of more than 235 Cray XE6 cabinets. In addition, there will be more than 30 cabinets of a future version of what's recently been announced as the Crazy XK6 supercomputer, these containing the next-generation Tesla GPUs again based on the "Kepler" architecture. Can't wait to grab a setup for my underground beat laboratory!