Map showing national impact. Orange states represent EPSCoR states that have been impacted. The white dots show the institutions for principal investigators leading one or more projects. The yellow circles are Minority Serving Institutions that have been impacted. The blue triangles are institutions that have had Blue Waters fellows.

About Blue Waters

Blue Waters is one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world and is one of the fastest supercomputers on a university campus. Scientists and engineers across the country use the computing and data power of Blue Waters to tackle a wide range of challenging problems, from predicting the behavior of complex biological systems to simulating the evolution of the cosmos. Read more about the teams using Blue Waters.

Blue Waters, built from the latest technologies from Cray, Inc., uses hundreds of thousands of computational cores to achieve peak performance of more than 13 quadrillion calculations per second. If you could multiply two numbers together every second, it would take you millions of years to do what Blue Waters does each second. Blue Waters also has:

more than 1.5 petabytes of memory, enough to store 300 million images from your digital camera;

more than 25 petabytes of disk storage, enough to store all of the printed documents in all of the world’s libraries; and

up to 500 petabytes of tape storage, enough to store 10 percent of all of the words spoken in the existence of humankind.

Blue Waters is supported by the National Science Foundation and the University of Illinois.

For more information, including details about applying to use Blue Waters, how it is being used, and scientific results achieved by using the supercomputer, visit the Blue Waters website.

Photos of Blue Waters are available for download and video is available on NCSA's YouTube channel. If you would like to visit Blue Waters and learn more about NCSA, request a tour.

Blue Waters Webinars

Blue Waters is providing a series of free webinars throughout the year. The webinars are conducted on Wednesdays, with a few exceptions to avoid conflicts with such events as the Blue Waters Symposium, PEARC and SC Conferences. Most sessions are an hour in length, although they can go longer or shorter. Sessions start at 8 AM Pacific / 9 AM Mountain / 10 AM Central / 11 AM Eastern / 4 PM GMT.

All sessions will be broadcast on YouTube Live, and recorded for playback. These sessions are free and open to everyone who has registered. Registered participants will be able to pose questions using NCSA's Blue Waters Slack environment.

Registered participants may join the webinars from their own web-enabled device, although we encourage people to meet together as a group to promote active discussions among the local participants.

To receive the Youtube live web address and a Slack channel invitation for each webinar, please register using this form. The YouTtube Live web and Slack channel addresses will be sent a few days before the event.

Blue Waters is supported by the National Science Foundation through awards ACI-0725070 and ACI-1238993.