IBM and NCSA end their Blue Waters affair, go back to just being supercomputing friends

It seems that IBM and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois have hit a snag in their once fruitful relationship. After nearly four years of partnering for the Blue Waters petabyte supercomputer, the NCSA's recently released a joint statement explaining that IBM's "terminated" its involvement with the project. If you'll recall, IBM was supplying its latest Power 780 servers to get all that data flowing, but the company's now decided that Ol' Blue will require more resources than initially anticipated. Apparently, there were talks to try and keep the spark alive, but since those fell through both have decided to return each others CDs and hoodies assets involved with the project (per contract terms): IBM gives back the money, while the NCSA returns any hardware supplied. The two plan on remaining in touch for future endeavours, and the NCSA doesn't appear to be too down either as it'll be consulting with the National Science Foundation to keep Blue Waters afloat. You'll find the official statement in the source link below, but we've included a video rendition of how we'd like to imagine it past the break.

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IBM and NCSA end their Blue Waters affair, go back to just being supercomputing friends originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Aug 2011 12:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.