Sustained-Petascale In Action: Blue Waters Enabling Transformative Science And Engineering

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This a renewal award to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) to operate Blue Waters, which is a leadership class compute, network, and storage system, that will deliver unprecedented large scale and highly usable computing capabilities to the national research community. Blue Waters provides the capability for researchers to tackle much larger and more complex research challenges across a wide spectrum of domain than can be done now, and opens up entirely new possibilities and frontiers in science and engineering. This system is located at the newly constructed National Petascale Computing Facility at UIUC. This award enables investigators across the country to conduct innovative research in a number of areas including: using three-dimensional, compressible, finite difference, magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) codes to understand how internal solar magnetoconvection powers the Sun's activity, and how that activity heats the chromosphere and corona and accelerates charged particles to relativistic energies; applying adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) technologies to study flows of partially ionized plasma in the outer heliosphere; implementing multiscale methods to study protein induced membrane remodeling key steps of the HIV viral replication cycle and clathrin coated pit formation in endocytosis; testing of the hypothesis that transport fluxes and other effects associated with cloud processes and ocean mesoscale eddy mixing are significantly different from the theoretically derived averages embodied in the parameterizations used in current-generation climate models; and, exploring systems-of-systems engineering design challenges to discover optimal many-objective satellite constellation design tradeoffs that include Earth science applications. Large allocations of resources on the new system have been awarded to scientists and engineers by NSF through a separate peer-reviewed competition. The Blue Waters system and project are aligned with NSF's Advanced Computing Infrastructure Strategy to promote next generation computational and data intensive applications. These applications are being developed by multiple teams of researchers who will revolutionize and transform our knowledge of science and engineering across many disciplines. The system supports new modalities of computation, new programming models, enhanced system software, accelerator technologies and novel storage. The robust design and configuration of Blue Waters ensures that it will meet the evolving needs of the diverse science and engineering communities over the full lifetime of the system. The broader impacts of this award include: provisioning unique infrastructure for research and education; accelerating education and training in the use of advanced computational science; training new users on how to use petascale computing techniques; promoting an exchange of information between academia and industry about the petascale applications; and broadening participation and collaborations in computational science with other research institutions and projects nationally and internationally.