Deployment and testing of the sustained petascale Blue Waters system

•The article presents experiences from the deployment of the largest Cray system.•The article presents the coordination and control processes to manage the deployment.•The article presents details and results from many acceptance tests.•Sustained petascale performance was measured for a broad mix of applications.•Blue Waters is one of the most powerful systems currently available for open-science.

Deployment of a large parallel system typically involves several steps of preparation, delivery, installation, testing and acceptance, making such deployments a very complex process. Despite the availability of various petascale systems currently, the steps and lessons from their deployment are rarely described in the literature. This article documents our experiences from the deployment of the sustained petascale Blue Waters system at NCSA. Our presentation is focused on the final deployment steps, where the system was intensively tested and accepted by NCSA. Those experiences and lessons should be useful to guide similarly complex deployments of large systems in the future.