Grant NSF OCI-0725070

The Blue Waters Petascale system, to be deployed by NSF at Illinois/NCSA, will:

Deliver sustained performance of one to two petaflops for many real-world scientific and engineering applications. These are codes scientists and engineers use every day, not simple benchmarks commonly used to rank high-performance computers.
Enable the next generation of science and engineering applications -- those that use multiple models at multiple scales to describe natural and engineered events and systems, such as modeling cells, organs, and organisms; predicting the impact of hurricanes, including the impact of the storm surge; and designing aircraft.
Prepare the next generation of leaders in high-performance computing to exploit petascale computing for scientific discovery and engineering innovation through a new Virtual School for Computational Science and Engineering aimed at graduate students and beyond.
Encourage broad and substantial changes to undergraduate curriculum through an ambitious education program that is tied closely to hands-on research, preparing the next generation of teachers, scientists, and workers to use high-performance computing.
Build upon the success of the strong industry relationships that we and our partners in the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation have established, bringing petascale computing to bear on industry's most challenging problems.