Supercomputers are becoming more powerful by each passing year. And this is inevitable because the needs of researchers are also increasing exponentially. They now need to construct complex structure and try to create to models which are extremely complex. Can supercomputers catch up with these needs? It seems like machines such as Blue Water may be an ample answer to these needs. Blue Water is a supercomputer which is now being installed University of Illinois.
Blue Water comes packed with some really, really hefty specs. It took a long while for this machine to be developed. The development had started as early as 2007 and has completed only recently. IBM first started working on the computer but then eventually had to give up in 2011 due to hefty costs and technical concerns. The project was then taken over by Cray who took it to completion.
The supercomputer has been built with 235 Cray XE6 cabinets and makes use of AMD Opteron 6200 processors. Some more additions are to be done to the computer which includes 30 cabinets of an upcoming Cray XK6 computer with Nvidia Tesla GPUs.
Blue Water will be installed in nine months, given the size of the project. Researchers believe that a computer with such high speeds as can be offered by Blue Waters can really help a lot in achieving many break-throughs in multiple fields of science.
Image courtesy Wikipedia Commons.
