Up close with America's national supercomputer, Blue Waters (pictures)

CHAMPAIGN, Ill.--While those with high security clearances sometimes have access to powerful government supercomputers, academics, scientists, and engineers often have not. That's why the National Center for Supercomputing Applications launched Blue Waters, one of the world's most powerful supercomputers, in March. Funded with an initial $208 million grant and a five-year operations grant of $151 million by the National Science Foundation, Blue Waters was installed at the National Petascale Computing Facility at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.

With the capacity of completing in excess of a quadrillion calculations per second on a sustained basis -- and ten times that at peak performance -- Blue Waters was meant to be ideal for providing the scientific community with the processing speed, data storage, memory, and communication necessary to take on many of the most complex computing tasks.

The supercomputer comprises 22,640 Cray XE6 nodes and 3,072 Cray XK7 nodes with NVIDIA graphics processor acceleration. The XE6 nodes have 64 GB of memory per node, while the XK7s each have 32 GB of memory. Blue Waters also boasts a quick online storage capacity of 26 petabytes, and 380 petabytes of longer term tape data storage.

This is a look inside one of the Spectra T-Finity cabinets that make up the 380 petabytes of long term storage.

The National Petascale Computing Facility was built with 20,000 of usable space for Blue Waters. The facility was built with biometric scanners for security -- so that it can compete for future applications with high-security operations elsewhere -- and can withstand an F3 tornado.

It takes a huge amount of cables to power and connect all the Blue Waters nodes, as this look at the wiring infrastructure underneath the supercomputer reveals.

Blue Waters consists of 12 rows of 24 Cray cabinets, including this one, seen from the back with its wiring on display.

Each of the Blue Waters cabinets has 24 blades arrayed in three rows of eight blades each.

There are 12 rows of 24 Cray cabinets in the Blue Waters configuration.

Cray has a number of employees on-site at the National Petascale Computing Facility in order to service and maintain Blue Waters.

For long-term storage needs, the National Petascale Computing Facility provides Blue Waters users with 380 petabytes of tape storage.

Each of Blue Waters' rows has three cooling cabinets at the end, which are connected to the computing nodes via the silver piping on the top.

In addition to the 380 petabytes of long-term tape storage available to Blue Waters users, there is also 26 petabytes of short-term, online storage available via these Cray Sonexion machines.

Opening up the floor in the Blue Waters room reveals massive amounts of cables and wires that connect the various nodes.

In order to operate Blue Waters, the National Petascale Computing Facility maintains these massive cooling pipes, which altogether circulate 5,400 tons of chilled water with a capacity of 9,300 gallons per minute.

Water is pumped through giant sumps and then to heat exchangers (on the left side, on the floor) in order to provide Blue Waters with enough cooling water.

In order to provide Blue Waters with enough power to stay operational 24 hours a day, the National Petascale Computing Facility has 20 transformers -- of which 14 are dedicated to the supercomputer. The system has a capacity of 13,800 volts coming in, and it is approved for a total of 24 megawatts, although it is currently only using about 13.5 megawatts. That means the facility can almost double in size if needed.

The NPCF has a total of 20 giant transformers, 14 for Blue Waters, two spares, two which serve non-Blue Waters systems, and two which serve the facility itself.

The NPCF cooling system includes several of these giant sumps.

This display provides technicians with a quick view about the status of the 380-petabyte tape storage system.

This display provides information about the status of the cooling cabinets.

There is a six-foot deep well under the floor of the supercomputer room at the NPCF, inside of which is a network of these large cooling pipes.

A look at the 20,000 square feet of space available for supercomputers at the National Petascale Computing Facility at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Though Blue Waters is already one of the world's most powerful supercomputers, the facility has room to expand.