The 200,000 processor core system known as Blue Waters is being built by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and its National Centre for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).

According to a press release, the contract with IBM will be to build the world's first sustained petascale computer. Blue Waters is expected to deliver sustained performance of more than one petaflop on many real-world scientific and engineering applications.

All of that memory and storage will be globally addressable, meaning that processors will be able to share data from a single pool exceptionally quickly, researchers said.  Blue Waters will come online in 2011.

The system will be used to study complex processes like the interaction of the Sun's coronal mass ejections with the Earth's magnetosphere and ionosphere.  Also down to be looked at are the formation and evolution of galaxies in the early universe and understanding the reactions that occur with living cells. It will also be used to design of new materials.