EYP Mission Critical Facilities (EYP MCF), an internationally recognized leader in the facility infrastructure planning, design and operations of high-performance computing (HPC) facilities, has announced it has been selected as the lead design firm for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications’ (NCSA) new petascale computing building at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

This facility will be home to the world’s most powerful “leadership-class” supercomputer, supported by Track 1 supercomputer funding from the National Science Foundation.

This “petascale” system is expected to make arithmetic calculations at a sustained rate in excess of an amazing 1,000-trillion operations per second (a “petaflop” per second) to help investigators solve some of the world’s most challenging scientific and engineering research problems. The supercomputer, called “Blue Waters, will be 500 times more powerful than today’s typical supercomputer. Expected to go online in 2011, the system may be used to study complex processes like the interaction of the Sun’s coronal mass ejections with the Earth’s magnetosphere and ionosphere; the formation and evolution of galaxies in the early universe; and understanding the chains of reactions that occur with living cells. EYP MCF had previously provided consulting, programming, and schematic design services for the new HPC building.

In 2007, EYP MCF furthered its best-in-class HPC and research computing facility planning and design experience with additional engagements at Argonne National Laboratory, Indiana University, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. EYP MCF provided technology planning and engineering design services for the power and cooling infrastructure supporting these high-density supercomputer installations.

How fast are these HPC systems? At Argonne National Laboratory, one of the two computers to be installed is a 445 teraflops system that can perform 445 trillion calculations per second, which means to match that speed every one of the 6 billion people on Earth would need to perform 70,000 calculations per second. EYP MCF participated on a design-build team that delivered the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, which houses the supercomputing system.

For Indiana University, EYP MCF provided programming and design services for IU’s new 82,700 square foot datacenter building, which broke ground on October 12 and will house not only IU’s supercomputer, but also its critical academic and administrative technology infrastructure. The IU datacenter combines high-density research computing and highly reliable administrative computing pods in a single secure, scalable, and resilient facility.

EYP MCF also was the lead design firm for the Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations (CCNI) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), which opened in September. This facility is home to an HPC system ranked No. 7 in the June 2007 listing of the Top 500 most powerful supercomputers worldwide.