The Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation is a collaboration among colleges, universities, national research laboratories, and other educational institutions. The consortium facilitates the widespread and effective use of petascale computing, through the development of new computing software, applications, and technologies. A comprehensive educational and workforce development program ensures that advances made by consortium members are passed on to the next generation of researchers and applied to frontier research questions in science, technology, engineering, and the social sciences.
The consortium is a key element of the Blue Waters Project. Blue Waters, which is being funded by the National Science Foundation and developed in collaboration with IBM, will be the world's first sustained petascale computational system dedicated to open scientific research. Announced in the fall of 2007, Blue Waters will sustain performance of one to two petaflops on many real-world scientific and engineering applications. It will come online in 2011.
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications, on behalf of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is the lead institution organizing and managing the GLCPC.
Through coordinated, multi-institutional teams—including application scientists and engineers, computer engineers, computer scientists, industrial researchers, and educators—the consortium will: