ABSTRACT
Blue Waters is a very well-balanced sustained petascale system being deployed into the National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Cyber Infrastructure portfolio in 2012 for a diverse range of unique science and engineering challenges that require huge amounts of sustained performance. NSF is the primary sponsor of the Blue Waters Project, along with substantial support from the state of Illinois and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). NCSA was established in 1986 as one of the original sites of the NSF's Supercomputer Centers Program as a partnership of the University of Illinois, the state of Illinois, and the federal government. By agreement with the NSF allocations at least 80% of the Blue Waters resources are allocated via the Petascale Computing Resource Allocation process known as Partner Allocation Process and Assumptions (PRAC). Blue Waters have the most intense storage subsystems in open science with its combination of very large capacity and very high bandwidth storage.
