Blue Waters Supercomputer Available for Educational Projects

As part of the Blue Water project, up to 1 percent (or 1.8 million node-hours) per year of the system's computational capacity is available for educational uses, including semester-long courses, workshops, and institutes.

These Education Allocations are intended to broaden the impact of Blue Waters and contribute to the development of a national workforce with expertise in petascale computing. The allocation is to enable projects that advance petascale computational and data analysis knowledge and skills, foster projects that are visionary and/or are national in scope, integrate research and education activities among national science and engineering communities, and proactively engage under-represented groups and individuals in science, engineering and scholarly research.

Some possible educational topics include:

• Large-scale datasets and optimization of I/O file access.
• Developing and testing of codes that use advanced methods, languages and tools.
• Optimizing and scaling of a community code to a large-scale simulation.
• Optimizing or developing new libraries and tools that will leverage architecture features or processor counts unique to the Blue Waters system.
• Modeling of systems or codes.
• Use of large-scale computation and data analytics in discipline specific classes and events.

The Blue Waters Education Allocations Committee anticipates that up to 20 allocations will be supported at a time. Projects may be for at most one year but will typically cover a one- to two-week period or a semester.

For complete details and to submit a proposal, visit: https://bluewaters.ncsa.illinois.edu/education-allocations.