Opportunities for Purdue research computing and computing education projects with the Blue Waters petascale computer being built at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) were highlighted at a Purdue seminar in September.

The seminar was held at Purdue’s Discovery Park and sponsored by ITaP and ITaP's research-computing arm, the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing.

The featured speaker was William T.C. Kramer, deputy project director and co-principal investigator for Blue Waters at NCSA, with a talk titled “Challenges and Opportunities of Petascale Computing.” Kramer earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from Purdue. For more information, visit the program Web page.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, Blue Waters is expected to be the most powerful supercomputer available for open scientific research when it comes online in 2011. The project includes the NCSA, the University of Illinois, IBM and the Great Lakes Consortium. Purdue is one of the consortium’s 28 members. Gerry McCartney, Purdue's vice president for information technology and chief information officer, serves as a consortium board member.

A key element of the Blue Waters project, the consortium of universities, colleges, national research laboratories and other institutions is to develop new software, applications and technologies for petascale computing. The consortium also is to create educational and workforce development programs related to Blue Waters.

Writer: Greg Kline, science and technology writer, ITaP, (765) 494-8167, gkline@purdue.edu

Last updated: Sept. 29, 2009

Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907 USA, (765) 494-4600
© 2009 Purdue University. An equal access, equal opportunity university.

Inquiries or comments: itap@purdue.edu