The University of Illinois says Seattle-based Cray will take over construction of the stalled US$300 million Blue Waters supercomputer project, three months after IBM pulled out citing cost and technical concerns. Cray expects to have the computer online next year, keeping the project, which is being primarily paid for by the National Science Foundation, on track to finish on time. The cost and financing will stay essentially the same, Cray CEO Peter Ungara said. The NSF will provide just over US$200 million with the remaining US$100 million coming from the university and the state of Illinois. Cray will be paid US$188 million, the equivalent of about half of its total revenue from its most recent fiscal year.

Blue Waters was announced in 2007 as a project to build what would have been at least briefly the world's fastest computer and a computer that could operate at sustained speeds of a petaflop - a thousand trillion operations a second and a long-sought standard that makes massive computational projects possible.

Source: Economic Times

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