The University
of Illinois says
Seattle-based Cray Inc. will take over construction of the stalled $300 million
Blue Waters supercomputer project, three months after IBM pulled out citing
cost and technical concerns.
Cray expects to have the computer online next year, keeping
the project, which is being primarily paid for by the National Science
Foundation, on track to finish on time.
“We clearly had to do it real quickly,” said Thom
Dunning, the director of the school’s National Center
for Supercomputing Applications. “NSF’s goal was to keep the project on
track as much as it possibly could be.”
The cost and financing will stay
essentially the same, Cray CEO Peter Ungaro said. The NSF will provide just
over $200 million with the remaining $100 million coming from the university
and the state of Illinois.
Cray will be paid $188 million, the equivalent of about half of its total
revenue from its most recent fiscal year.
“This is a transformational contract for the company,”
Ungaro said. “It’s a very big deal for us. It’s a huge contract based on
the size of the company and we couldn’t be more excited about it.”
The design and scope of what Blue Waters should be able to
do in the years ahead will change, he said.
Once completed, the supercomputer will be used for a range
of projects, including the study of how tornadoes are formed and how viruses
invade cells.
Blue Waters was announced in 2007 as a project to build what
would have been at least briefly the world’s fastest computer and a computer
that could operate at sustained speeds of a petaflop—a thousand trillion
operations a second and a long-sought standard that makes massive computational
projects possible.
There are now a number of computers capable of faster peak
speeds, the fastest being the K Computer in Japan.
Blue Waters will still aim to be able to run at petaflop
speeds for long periods, but it will also now incorporate graphics processing
units, or GPUs, which will increase its power, Dunning and Ungaro said. GPUs
have tremendous power to allow them to handle high-demand graphics
applications, but they’ve only seriously been applied to general-purpose
computing since the Blue Waters project was conceived, Dunning said.
The incorporation of this relatively new use for graphics
technology could also extend the computer’s life, Ungaro said.
“I think we’re building a system that almost
future-proofs it in many ways,” he said.
Blue Waters’ will have what Ungaro called “a tremendous
amount of memory,” 1.5 petabytes, a quadrillion bytes. Large amounts of
memory were something Dunning said researchers told the university they’d like
to see in the project as the university looked for a new builder.
Cray competed to be the builder of Blue Waters when the NSF
chose the University
of Illinois and IBM in
2007, and Ungaro said he’d thought a lot about the project since then,
“but it hasn’t been anything that’s been in our plans or even our dreams
over the last couple of years.”
But as far back as April, officials at the Supercomputing Center
said, it was apparent that there were problems that could derail the project.
When IBM backed out in August, it cited technical and cost
concerns about the project, but didn’t provide details. A $72 million building
built just for the project, the National Petascale Computing Facility, was
built on the university campus.
At the time, the NSF said there were no guarantees that the project
would continue.
Now, Dunning said, 25 groups from around the world,
including several from the university, have tentatively been given time on Blue
Waters, with perhaps a dozen ready to go when the computer goes online.
“We’ll be holding (the projects) back trying to figure
out how we schedule them on the machine,” Dunning said.
SOURCE – The Associated Press
