The Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) announced that it is a charter member of the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation. The consortium will encourage the widespread and effective use of petascale computing to advance scientific discovery and the state-of-the-art in engineering, increase regional and national competitiveness, and train tomorrow's computational researchers and educators. The Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation includes dozens of universities, colleges, research laboratories, and institutes from around the country. It will be key to the development of Blue Waters, which is expected to be the world's first sustained-petascale computational system dedicated to open scientific research. Blue Waters’ home will be the University of Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). It is a joint effort of NCSA, Illinois, IBM, and the Great Lakes Consortium. It is supported by the National Science Foundation. Blue Waters will go online in 2011, providing researchers with the power to tackle scientific problems that previously were out of reach. In addition to raw computing power, the Blue Waters project also will include intense support for application development, system software development, interactions with business and industry, and educational programs. This comprehensive approach will ensure that users across the country will be able to use Blue Waters to its fullest potential. “RENCI looks forward to playing an important role in the success of what will be the most powerful computing system ever built for open scientific research,” said RENCI Interim Director Alan Blatecky. “Blue Water users will have the potential to make world-changing discoveries in biology, medicine, physics, environmental sciences and more. We will part of the team that will make using this world-class system as seamless as possible.” As a member of the GLPC, RENCI researchers will develop methods and tools for monitoring and analyzing performance on Blue Waters. The RENCI team also will work closely with scientific teams to ensure that their codes run smoothly on the system. "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 Illinois. "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 the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation, see its Web site. For more information on Blue Waters, see its Web site.