A new building at the U. of Illinois will house a high-powered supercomputer. (U. of Illinois image)
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will break ground Wednesday for an 88,000-square-foot building to house a new petascale supercomputer that it plans to bring online in 2011. The IBM machine, for which the National Science Foundation is giving the university a $208-million grant, will be called Blue Waters and “will have greater computing capacity than all the current Top 500 supercomputers combined,” according to John R. Melchi, senior associate director for administration at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, which will oversee the machine.
The $72.5-million building’s 20,000-square-foot machine room will have space enough for both the petascale machine and whatever machine comes after it. The building will also house about 40 staff members and will, the university says, “combine top-flight physical and cybersecurity with the open, collaborative research attitudes of a public institution.”
The building was designed by EYP Mission Critical Facilities — which had been a division of the architecture firm Einhorn Yaffee Prescott but was acquired last year by Hewlett-Packard — and by Gensler. It includes a number of features intended to save electricity. Like the new supercomputer center at the University of California at San Diego, the Illinois facility will keep its machinery cool by routing chilled water into the frame that holds the computer’s processors, rather than byusing chilled water to cool air and blowing that over the processors. IBM says a similar arrangement on another machine reduces energy consumption by 40 percent. About 60 percent of the time, three on-site cooling towers are expected to handle the facility’s water-cooling needs without drawing on the university’s main chilled-water system.
The facility is expected to earn a gold-level certification from the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program, known as LEED. —Lawrence Biemiller
