The Blue Waters petascale computing system, under construction by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, will be the most powerful computer in the world when it comes online in 2011. The National Science Foundation is currently soliciting proposals for computing time to explore big questions that can’t be addressed with other existing computer systems.

We will be hosting a virtual workshop and applicant briefing on Blue Waters to encourage our grantees to develop high-impact community proposals for computing time on this very important new resource. Given the amount of NIGMS-supported biological and biomedical research that utilizes a variety of computing platforms, we think there are a lot of great research opportunities.

The videocast is scheduled for Thursday, Dec. 17, from 2-4 p.m. You will be able to access it at http://videocast.nih.gov/summary.asp?live=8324. During the discussion, we will tell you about the opportunity, identify areas of science within the NIGMS mission that may benefit from Blue Waters, and help interested scientists form collaborations to submit proposals.

Presenters include Jeremy Berg, Stephen Meacham from NSF, Eric Jakobsson and Thom Dunning from the University of Illinois, and John Moult from the University of Maryland. You may join the live discussion by e-mailing questions and comments via the NIH Videocast Web site or by sending them to me. You also can send me your ideas or questions ahead of time.

Because of the considerable NIGMS investment in protein folding and prediction of protein structure from sequence, we will explore this area during the videocast. We realize that many other areas within the NIGMS mission may also benefit from access to Blue Waters, and we welcome discussion about those as well.

We have also set up a Web site where you can post your ideas and interests in using Blue Waters and/or forming collaborations.