IBM has to financ lwa le reasons the participation in the construction of a supercomputer for an American university discontinued. The Blue Waters supercomputer needs to be delivered in 2012, but it is unclear whether that is being achieved.
The construction of the Blue Waters supercomputer was already in 2007 announced. The computer must be given a place in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications of the university of Illinois. The project is largely funded by the National Science Foundation and would be around 308 million dollars. The NSF has 208 million has been made available, while the university guarantees for the remaining $ 100 million.
IBM has about 30 million dollars in public funds are received and will refund money. Reason for IBM to the project to cease would be an increase in costs for both the design and future technical support.
The IBM servers that are already in the super computer centre are installed, and IBM returned. The National Petascale Computing Facility of the univerisiteit of Illinois needs to find a different hardware partner for the Blue Waters project to complete. The NSF should be in mid-september vote on the further implementation of the project, what the university under the pressure of time. A team of about one hundred and twenty people is concerned with the construction of the supercomputer.
The Blue Waters supercomputer would be a so-called petascale supercomputer. The water-cooled computer would continuously speeds of around 1 petaflop. This would make the computer slower than the current fastest supercomputer, Japan’s K Computer. Which gets peak speeds up to 8 petaflop, but the continuous speed is lower.