News release: “Extending more than 50 years of supercomputing leadership, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and its National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) announced today that they have finalized their contract with IBM to build the world’s first sustained petascale computational system dedicated to open scientific research. This leadership-class project, called Blue Waters, is supported by a $208 million grant from the National Science Foundation and will come online in 2011…The system will deliver sustained performance of more than one petaflop on many real-world scientific and engineering applications. A petaflop is computing parlance for 1 quadrillion calculations per second…More than 200,000 processor cores will make that performance possible. They will be coupled to more than a petabyte of memory and more than 10 petabytes of disk storage. All of that memory and storage will be globally addressable, meaning that processors will be able to share data from a single pool exceptionally quickly.”