The governing board of the National Science Foundation today approved a plan to build the world’s most powerful supercomputer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The university will be awarded $208-million over the next four and a half years to construct Blue Waters, a machine that will break the petaflop barrier. In other words, the computer will be able to perform more than one quadrillion operations in a second.
The board also pledged to send $65-million to the University of Tennessee at Knoxville’s Joint Institute for Computational Sciences, which will build a supercomputer that operates at speeds of just under a petaflop.
Illinois’s prestigious grant was coveted by many American research institutions, some of which argued that the country’s strongest supercomputers should be kept at national laboratories. But the university appears to have won out: The foundation is expected to finalize the agreement in the fall. —Brock Read
