[Article] University of Illinois plans $72.5 million supercomputer home

Ruu_Old

Heard this on the local news this morning and thought it might interest some.

University of Illinois trustees voted Wednesday to spend $72.5 million for a building to house a new supercomputer, but most of the money is tied up in a state capital-spending plan stalled in Springfield.

The building on the Champaign-Urbana campus will house the computer known as Blue Waters, which will be the fastest computer in the world when it is finished in 2011. The university, which says it doesn't have the existing space to house the new computer, plans to fund the construction in part with a $208 million National Science Foundation grant.

The computer, to be built by the university's National Center for Supercomputing Applications and IBM, would be capable of performing a thousand trillion mathematical operations a second. That standard for computational speed is known as a petaflop, a hurdle computer scientists have long sought to clear.

IBM's Blue Gene/L in California is currently the world's fastest supercomputer, but it has only about a third of Blue Waters' expected capability. The Supercomputing Centers' fastest existing supercomputer, Abe, has less than a tenth of Blue Waters' processing power.

RoyalMarine

do you reckon it will be watercooled? :rolleyes::rolleyes:

any links?