New Blue Waters Supercomputer at University of Illinois Can Make Weather Predictions, Examine Viruses

Being able to predict the weather on a more accurate level, or get a better examination of how viruses attack cells have been dreams of scientists around the world.

Thanks to a new supercomputer unveiled at the University of Illinois Friday, science may be on the edge of being able to do that.

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) unveiled Blue Waters, a groundbreaking supercomputer that runs with 10,000 computer processors and can calculate a staggering amount of date--more than 1 quadrillion calculations per second.

Trish Barker, a spokesperson for the NCSA, told WBEZ.com that the new supercomputer will help researchers make mathematical models for various environmental conditions that can help them not only predict, but even prevent, natural disasters from occurring.

" A lot of what people are doing are mathematical modeling," Barker said. "They have equations that they feel do a pretty good job of what's happening in the real world like a tornado or hurricane. They want to make models that match what's happening in the world more and more closely. And that's why they want more and more powerful supercomputers that enables them to do more calculations in a shorter period of time."

Blue Waters is a technological feat, as Engadget.com notes, the supercomputer--the first of its kind at any university--comprised of 237 Cray XE6 cabinets, 32 XK7 cabinets, NVIDIA GK110 Kepler GPU interior accelerators flanked by y 22,640 compute nodes-- each with two AMD 6276 Interlagos processors clocked at 2.3 GHz or higher.

The result? A computer that, at peak performance, can generate as much as 11.61 quadrillion calculations per second.

Roughly $350 million was sunk into the building of the computer, the Chicago Business Journal reports, with the work first done by IBM and then Cray Inc.

Already, the computer has been tested, which led an Illinois physics professor, Klaus Schulten, to successfully map part of the HIV capsid, the Daily Illini reported. With this newfound understanding of how HIV infects human cells, it could open the doorway to a cure for the deadly virus one day.

In celebration of the creation of the computer Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn declared Thursday to be Blue Waters Supercomputer Day in the state.

"Today is a special day for our planet," Quinn said. "It's amazing what human beings can accomplish when no one worries about who gets the credit."