On August 8, 2011, NCSA announced that IBM had terminated its contract to provide hardware for the project, and would refund payments to date.

[3] Blue Waters ran science and engineering codes at sustained speeds of at least one petaFLOPS.

A new National Petascale Computing Facility was built at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign at the corner of Oak Street and St. Mary's Road.

This facility houses Blue Waters and other NCSA computing, networking, and data systems.

The building was designed using complex fluid dynamic models to optimize the cooling system.