BLUE WATERS

 

Young Dr. Frankenstein

Are you tired of living in the shadows? Performing your work in poorly lit dank basements, drafty garages, mobile labs or perhaps sharing space in some tucked away storage room. Are you finding difficulty keeping your underpaid, unappreciated igorian assistants motivated enough so that they wont abandon ship. Well the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana is looking for a few good Frankenstein likes.

On March 28, 2013, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the University brought their new creation online. This machine known as Blue Waters, instantly became one of the worlds most powerful supercomputers. Blue Waters is also the largest supercomputer in the world known to exist on a college campus. For scientists, engineers or academics, Blue Waters is their lifeline for their massive computing capability needs.

In 2007 the university announced its plans for a project to build one of the fastest super computers in the world. IBM was to be the contracted builder based on their IBMS Power 7 processor technology. Citing profitability concerns, IBM soon pulled the plug in August 2011 and canceled their contract. This sudden action by IBM left Blue Waters future an uncertainty. With a new $72 million dollar building built to house the project sitting practically empty there was a scramble by the university and NCSA to find a new builder. In comes Cray Inc., a company known for building supercomputers, thus calming the nerves of Blue Waters primary financiers, the National Science Foundation.

Blue Waters is composed of 237 Cray XE6 cabinets and 32 of the XK7 variety. NVIDIA GK110 Kepler GPU accelerators line the inside of the machine and are flanked by 22,640 computer nodes, which each pack two AMD 6276 interlog processors clocked at 2.3 GHZ or higher. At its peak performance, Blue Waters can churn out 11.61 quadrillion calculations per second.

To date 773 jobs have been started, 830 are queued up, and 738 are finished. In total, 27.5 percent of Blue Waters' nodes have been devoted to lattice quantum chromo dynamics, 17.5 percent were working on the Computational Microscope, 13.3 percent were focused on type 1a supernovae, and  the university's own Klaus Schulten has been able to figure out the exact chemical structure of the H1V capsid, a protein shell protecting the potentially deadly virus's genetic material and a key to its virulence.

So young Dr. Frankenstein and you Frankenstein likes, submit your proposals to the National Science Foundation. If you're selected you will be allotted time on Blue Waters which can perform a quadrillion calculations a second. This is a lifetime opportunity for you to come out of the shadows. Good Luck!