This week marks the dedication of the NSF “Blue Waters” supercomputer at NCSA.

Over the past 30 years, driven in large part by the NSF Supercomputer Centers program and its successors, science has been transformed by computation.  Scientific breakthroughs are no longer happening only in the field or in the lab – they are happening on computers.

“Science is now investing in supercomputers, and they are where many new scientific discoveries are being made,” says Michael Wiltberger, a space weather researcher.

The National Science Foundation is in the process of building up the nation’s computational power by funding the acquisition and deployment of three new leading-edge systems – “Yellowstone” at NCAR in Cheyenne, WY, “Blue Waters” at NCSA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and “Stampede” at TACC at the University of Texas at Austin.  Read more aobut the impact these supercomputers are having in fields ranging from weather to HIV research to quantum mechanics here.

(And remember, the next revolution in computational science is all about data analytics!)