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Blue Waters Professors

The Blue Waters Supercomputer was commissioned in March of 2013 and with it came the opportunity to award up to 4.8 million node hours per year of compute capacity to help recruit and retain the best computational scientists in the world through the Blue Waters Professors program which was managed by The Center for Extreme Scale Computation (CESC) at NCSA. Since the program’s inception, the University of Illinois and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications has allocated over 11.5 million node hours with a total value of over $7 million to 9 existing faculty and 11 new faculty recruits. In the spring of 2016 the CESC awarded the twentieth, and final, Blue Waters Professor appointment. Through this program, we estimate that we will award over 21 million node hours with a total value of over $13 million during the lifetime of Blue Waters. 

For details, please contact cesc@ncsa.illinois.edu.

Current Blue Waters Professors

Allocation Policy for Blue Waters Professors

  1. The maximum annual allocation for a Blue Waters Professor is up to 240,000 node-hours per year, or 3.9 million core-module hours. 
  2. On a quarterly basis, any Blue Waters Professor may request additional time from the CESC director. Requests should be in terms of node-hours and follow the format described above in the nomination process.
  3. Allocations may not be "stored" or carried over from year to year.  Allocation usage will be determined by the policy established by the Blue Waters project office for allocations.
  4. An allocation is renewable on an annual basis. A short report of the activities and results of work on Blue Water, along with the justification of time requested, should be submitted for review at least 30 days before the anniversary date of the allocation. It is policy to renew all allocations that are making effective use of the Blue Waters system. If the director of CESC determines that an allocation should not be renewed or should be reduced, that decision may be appealed to the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, whose decision is final.  Report guidelines and submissions instructions.
  5. Access to Blue Waters is subject to the rules and conditions established by the Blue Waters project office.