BIG DATA

Illinois Wesleyan University will be able to conduct scientific research on a new supercomputer. Once built, the computer will be housed at National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) on the campus of The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (U of I), and will be available to all members of the Great Lakes Consortium (GLC). The Consortium, of which IWU is a member, is a collaboration of dozens of universities, colleges, research laboratories and institutes from around the country. The GLC is developing the world's first sustained “petascale” computational system dedicated to open scientific research. This unprecedented machine, based on a powerful new system design from IBM, will be called Blue Waters. Supported by a $208 million grant from the National Science Foundation, it will come online in 2011 at the U of I. “IWU appreciates how quickly emerging techniques become woven into the technological and educational fabric of our society,” said Rebecca Roesner, chair of the Chemistry Department at Illinois Wesleyan, who noted several faculty members are exploring how the activities of the Great Lakes Consortium might dovetail with their ongoing scholarly efforts. The system will be capable of more than 10 quadrillion calculations per second of peak performance, known as 10 “petaflops,” in supercomputing language, which is 30 times more powerful than today’s fastest supercomputers, according to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. “Participation in the GLC, and access to a petascale facility like Blue Waters, affords IWU faculty and students a rare opportunity to be at the forefront of an important, emerging field,” said Roesner. “This will heighten awareness on campus of parallel computing and supercomputing and offer opportunities for faculty to integrate these techniques into their teaching and research.” According to organizers, the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation is committed to encouraging the widespread and effective use of petascale computing to advance scientific discovery and the state-of-the-art in engineering, to increasing regional and national competitiveness and to training tomorrow’s computational researchers and educators. “Blue Waters will be an unrivaled national asset, dedicated to scientific research that will have a powerful impact on society,” said Thom Dunning, NCSA director and a professor of chemistry at the U of I. “Our nation's top scientists – simulating new medicines or materials, the weather, disease outbreaks, or complex engineered systems like power plants and aircraft – are poised to make discoveries that we can only begin to imagine. Blue Waters and the scientists, engineers, technologists and educators of the Great Lakes Consortium are crucial to that success.” For more information on Blue Waters, see: www.ncsa.uiuc.edu. For more information on the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation, see: glcpc.ncsa.uiuc.edu.