GAMING

At SC09, NCSA's Bob Fiedler and Bob Wilhelmson will describe the Blue Waters sustained-petascale computing system and the Petascale Computing Resource Allocations (PRAC) program.

The PRAC program, supported by National Science Foundation, is the pathway to obtain an allocation on Blue Waters. Wilhelmson and Fiedler will discuss support available to PRAC winners in preparing their applications for Blue Waters, including training and access to application performance simulators and early hardware. They will also provide tips on writing a winning PRAC proposal.

This Birds-of-a-Feather gathering is part of SC09, the international conference for high-performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis. It will be held Wednesday, November 18, 2009, from 12:15 pm to 1:15 pm. The event will be in room A103-104 of the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon.

A list of other NCSA and University of Illinois activities at SC09 can be found at: http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/extreme-scale/.

NCSA will also post SC09 updates to its Facebook page throughout the show. Follow NCSA on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/NCSAatIllinois.

Blue Waters is expected to be the most powerful supercomputer in the world for open scientific research when it comes online in 2011. Researchers will advance nearly all fields of science using Blue Waters. They will predict the behavior of complex biological systems, understand how the cosmos evolved after the Big Bang, 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.

Blue Waters is a joint effort of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, its National Center for Supercomputing Applications, IBM, and the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation. It is supported by the National Science Foundation, the state of Illinois, and the University of Illinois.