U. Illinois to build computer faster than IU’s Big Red

IU’s “Big Red” is one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, but it will pale in comparison to the new supercomputer being built at the University of Illinois.\nIllinois is planning to create a supercomputer, named Blue Waters that will be built at the university’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications. With $208 million in funding from the National Science Foundation, Blue Waters will have the ability to perform one quadrillion calculations per second, said Trish Barker, a NCSA spokesperson. In comparison, when IU’s Big Red launched in 2006, it was able to perform 20.4 trillion calculations per second. \n“The goal in building a bigger supercomputer is to give scientists more power that they can apply to their research,” Barker said. \n Blue Waters will be available for open scientific research, which means that researchers across the country will be able to use this computer for research in fields such as chemistry, biology, cosmology and high-energy physics, Barker said. \nShe said that scientists use computer simulations to understand things that are very large, like the universe, or very small, like interactions of molecules and folding of proteins. From her example, she deduced that even though today’s fastest supercomputers are capable of trillions of calculations every second, scientists need even more computing power to be able to look at more variables and to look at phenomena at a finer resolution. \nShe added that as with other systems supported by the National Science Foundation, there will be a requests process that people wanting to use Blue Waters will have to go through. \nThere had been no work on the supercomputer, a final decision on whether or not the NCSA will receive the award form the NSF is expected at the end of September, said Barker. \n“The goal is to develop this system over the next several years,” Barker said. “We plan for it to be operational and available for research \nin 2011.” \nAs for IU, Link said in an e-mail that the University’s plans for updating systems are always driven by their commitment to serve \nlocal researchers. \n“This fall we will bring online a new ‘7 TFLOPS’ (TeraFLOPS, which is the measure of a computer’s speed) supercomputer called Quarry,” said Link in an e-mail. \nIn addition, the Quarry will be based on quad-core Intel processors and will particularly benefit researchers in physics, astronomy, geology \nand engineering.\n“We’re upgrading our overall capacity yet again, and doing it in a way that best meets the needs of IU scholars,” she said. \nAfter being named the “#1 wired campus” of public colleges and universities across the country by PC Magazine in 2006, it may come as no surprise that IU is home to one of the fastest computers in the world, Big Red. As of June 2006, it was ranked 23rd fastest on a list of the top 500 computers in the world. It’s one of the most powerful university-owned computers in the U.S. and was built primarily to support research at IU, according to a Knowledge Base article on IU’s UITS Web site. \n“Big Red supports many areas of scientific research, but particularly the life sciences,” said Matt Link, director of research and technology for UITS in an e-mail. “The chembio grid, which provides a library of chemical compound information used to speed drug development, is \none example.”