A new round of researchers from a broad range of scientific disciplines recently began working closely with the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications. These teams will prepare their scientific codes for the Blue Waters supercomputer, which is expected to be the most powerful computer in the world for open scientific research when it comes online at NCSA in 2011.

The teams were selected through the National Science Foundation's Petascale Computing Resource Allocation program.

"Our goal for Blue Waters is both simple and profoundly challenging: Deliver sustained-petascale performance on a wide range of applications that will create tomorrow's scientific discoveries," said Thom Dunning, director of NCSA and Blue Waters project director. Sustained-petascale refers to computers that can perform one quadrillion calculations per second on real-world codes used by scientists in their work.

Researchers partnering with NCSA to prepare codes to run on Blue Waters will build much more precise and powerful computational models. Areas explored by those researchers include earthquakes, thunderstorms, climate change, novel materials with broad industrial applications, and how unicellular organisms adapt to changes in their environments—among many other phenomena.

"These researchers don't care about a system's peak performance on benchmarks. They care about how much performance they can get when they run their simulations," Bill Kramer, the Blue Waters deputy project director, said. "To achieve sustained performance on these challenging simulations, you have to start collaborating with the scientists developing the applications early. The Petascale Computing Resource Allocation program allows us all to do that."

A dozen projects—representing about 30 universities and research labs across the country—were added in September and early October. The total number of teams now working with NCSA and Illinois on their codes is 18.

The awards include travel funds to support the collaboration.

Teams receiving Petascale Computing Resource Allocation awards this fall are:

• Computational relativity and gravitation at petascale: Simulating and visualizing astrophysically realistic compact binaries

  Principal Investigator: Manuela Campanelli, Rochester Institute of Technology
• Electronic properties of strongly correlated systems using petascale computing

  Principal Investigators: Kristjan Haule, Rutgers University New Brunswick; Sergey Savrasov, University of California-Davis
• Petascale research in earthquake system science on Blue Waters
  
Principal Investigator: Thomas Jordan, University of Southern California
• Testing hypotheses about climate prediction at unprecedented resolutions on the NSF Blue Waters system
  
Principal Investigators: Benjamin Kirtman, University of Miami; William Large, University Corporation For Atmospheric Research; David Randall, Colorado State University; Cristiana Stan, Institute of Global Environment and Society
• Computational chemistry at the petascale
  
Principal Investigator: Monica Lamm, Iowa State University
• Enabling science at the petascale: From binary systems and stellar core collapse to gamma-ray bursts
  
Principal Investigator: Erik Schnetter, Louisiana State University & Agricultural and Mechanical College
• Petascale simulations of complex biological behavior in fluctuating environments

  Principal Investigator: Ilias Tagkopoulos, University of California-Davis
• Enabling large-scale, high-resolution, and real-time earthquake simulations on petascale parallel computers

  Principal Investigator: Liqiang Wang, University of Wyoming
• Understanding tornadoes and their parent supercells through ultra-high resolution simulation/analysis
  
Principal Investigator: Robert Wilhelmson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Petascale simulation of turbulent stellar hydrodynamics

  Principal Investigator: Paul Woodward, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
• Petascale computations for complex turbulent flows

  Principal Investigator: Pui-Kuen Yeung, Georgia Institute of Technology
• Breakthrough petascale quantum Monte Carlo calculations

  Principal Investigator: Shiwei Zhang, College of William and Mary

Previous winners of Petascale Computing Resource Allocation awards, who continue to collaborate with the Blue Waters team, include:

• Formation of the first galaxies: predictions for the next generation of observatories
  
Principal Investigator: Brian O'Shea, Michigan State University
• Simulation of contagion on very large social networks with Blue Waters

  Principal Investigators: Keith Bisset, Virginia Tech; Shawn Brown, Carnegie-Mellon University; Douglas Roberts, Research Triangle Institute
• Lattice quantum chromodynamics on Blue Waters
  
Principal Investigator: Robert Sugar, University of California, Santa Barbara
• Super instruction architecture for petascale computing
  
Principal Investigator: Rodney Bartlett, University of Florida
• Peta-Cosmology: galaxy formation and virtual astronomy
  
Principal Investigator: Kentaro Nagamine, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
• The computational microscope
  
Principal Investigator: Klaus Schulten, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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