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

这是一项授予伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校（UIUC）国家超级计算应用中心（NCSA）的更新奖，该中心将运营Blue Waters，这是一个领先的计算、网络和存储系统，将为国家研究界提供前所未有的大规模和高度可用的计算能力。Blue Waters为研究人员提供了解决比现在更大、更复杂的研究挑战的能力，并在科学和工程领域开辟了全新的可能性和前沿。该系统位于UIUC新建的国家千万亿次计算设施中。该奖项使全国各地的研究人员能够在许多领域进行创新研究，包括：使用三维，可压缩，有限差分，磁流体动力学（MHD）代码来了解太阳内部磁对流如何为太阳活动提供动力，以及该活动如何加热色球层和日冕并将带电粒子加速到相对论能量；应用自适应网格细化（AMR）技术研究外日球层部分电离等离子体的流动；实施多尺度方法研究蛋白质诱导的HIV病毒复制周期关键步骤的膜重塑和胞吞作用中网格蛋白包被坑的形成；验证与云过程和海洋中尺度涡旋混合有关的输送通量和其他效应与当前气候模式中使用的参数化所体现的理论推导平均值显著不同的假设；探索系统的系统工程设计挑战，以发现包括地球科学应用在内的最佳多目标卫星星座设计权衡。NSF通过一个单独的同行评议竞赛，将新系统的大量资源分配给了科学家和工程师。蓝水系统和项目与NSF的高级计算基础设施战略保持一致，以促进下一代计算和数据密集型应用。这些应用程序是由多个研究团队开发的，他们将在许多学科中彻底改变我们的科学和工程知识。该系统支持新的计算方式、新的编程模型、增强的系统软件、加速器技术和新型存储。Blue Waters的强大设计和配置确保了它在系统的整个生命周期内满足各种科学和工程社区不断发展的需求。该奖项的广泛影响包括：为研究和教育提供独特的基础设施；加快先进计算科学应用方面的教育和培训；培训新用户如何使用千万亿次计算技术；促进学术界和工业界就千兆级应用交换信息；扩大与国内和国际其他研究机构和项目在计算科学方面的参与和合作。

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.