The National Science Foundation last week received approval from the National Science Board to create a $208 million supercomputer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It will be home of the IBM Blue Water, a supercomputer believed capable of a petaflop - one thousand trillion operations per second. Computing at Petascale levels has been the dream of researchers since several decades. IBM Blue Gene / L (pictured above) the current world's fastest supercomputer has only one third the expected power of Blue Water. Once completed it will be handling operations for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the usual stuff like weather modeling, biophysics and biochemistry and computer science projects.

Work on the Blue Water will start this fall, surprisingly the building which will house the supercomputer meets the space requirements but may not meet power requirements. Blue Water is expected to be complete sometime in 2011.