AMES, Iowa -- Iowa State University announced today 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 is a collaboration among 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. It is a joint effort of NCSA, Illinois, IBM, and the Great Lakes Consortium. It is supported by the National Science Foundation.
"Iowa State University researchers are excited to be a part of the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation," said Srinivas Aluru, a Stanley Chair in Interdisciplinary Engineering, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and the coordinator of Iowa State's work with the consortium. "The computing power of Blue Waters will advance the work of Iowa State researchers in computational chemistry, genomics, systems biology, materials science, nanotechnology and climate modeling."
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.
"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: http://www.greatlakesconsortium.org.
For more information on Blue Waters, see: http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/BlueWaters.
