Blue Waters Open for Business

NSF announces a call for worthy research projects to run on the petascale system.

The US National Science Foundation is seeking new proposals for research projects for the Blue Waters petascale supercomputer located at the University of Illinois's National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). According to the NSF, "The goal of this project and system is to open up new possibilities in science and engineering by providing computational capability that makes it possible for investigators to tackle much larger and more complex research challenges across a wide spectrum of domains."
The Blue Waters project bills itself as "one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world and the fastest supercomputer on a university campus." This request for proposals will divide up the available cycles on Blue Waters for deserving projects. Applicants are advised to "...demonstrate that they have a science or engineering research problem that requires and can effectively exploit the petascale computing capabilities offered by Blue Waters. NSF is welcoming "junior researchers." One of the objectives of the project is to start building a community of scientists "capable of using petascale computing."
For more information on the call for proposals, see the NSF website. Proposals are due by March 10, 2014.