Blue Waters will be the the world’s most powerful supercomputer for open scientific research and will be the first system of its kind to sustain one petaflop performance on a range of science and engineering applications. The project is now actively soliciting researchers to participate in the next and final round of allocations prior to the machine coming online in 2011. In order to receive an award of time on Blue Waters through the National Science Foundation allocation process, teams must receive a pre-allocation through the current Petascale Computing Resource Allocations (PRAC) process. The next round of PRAC proposals are due March 17, 2010, and information about the solicitation is available on the NSF website.
Bill Kramer, the deputy project director and co-principal investigator, will be visiting the UM campus in January or February 2010, and if you are interested in meeting with him during his visit please contact us, Professor Sharon Glotzer (sglotzer@umich.edu) who is serving as the UM liaison to the Blue Waters project, or Dr. Katherine Lawrence (kathla@umich.edu) in the Office of Research Cyberinfrastructure. The Blue Waters project has an extensive education and outreach program to help people understand how to make use of this facility, and it also has a facility to help people craft proposals. The architecture supports both computer- and data-intensive applications. We encourage those interested in applying to review the 18 projects that have already been reviewed and approved for allocations.
BREAKING NEWS: Feb. 1 webinar to provide overview, proposal writing tips for access to NSF’s sustained petascale Blue Waters supercomputer.
On Feb. 1, NCSA will host a two-hour webinar to provide details about the Blue Waters system, an overview of the PRAC program, and tips on writing successful PRAC proposals. Participants will have the opportunity to ask questions.
Presenters will include Daniel S. Katz, University of Chicago, and Blue Waters staff.
The webinar will begin at 12 noon EST (11 a.m. CST) on Feb. 1. To participate, go to https://eval.webex.com/eval/onstage/g.php?d=929809225&t=a and use the event password “prac.” No advance registration is required.
For more information on Blue Waters and the PRAC program, see:
http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/BlueWaters/
http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/BlueWaters/prac.html