CHAMPAIGN — IBM returned $30 million to the University of Illinois Wednesday afternoon, a week after it pulled out of the Blue Waters supercomputer project.

John Melchi, a senior associate director at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, said the money has been transferred to the university, as expected.

"It's per our plan. IBM was here uninstalling the three racks (of Power7 servers) that we discussed. Everything is being returned," he said Wednesday.

IBM ended its relationship with the Blue Waters project as a prime supplier of the water-cooled supercomputer effective Aug. 6.

NCSA said it still expects to meet its revised timeline of fall 2012 with another vendor. Tech blogs have frequently mentioned Cray Inc. as a possible supplier. Cray has said it is capable of providing equipment, but would not comment on deadlines.

According to a UI statement, "NCSA is confident that its goal of building a sustained-petascale supercomputer remains achievable in a timely manner. NCSA is coordinating with the National Science Foundation to ensure project continuity and that the goals of the project are achieved."

Melchi said "it's still too early to say who the next vendor will be."

He said NCSA still has a few weeks to satisfy the National Science Foundation's request for a new proposal.

Blue Waters, which may change its name now that it is no longer connected to Big Blue, is intended to have a sustainable speed of 1 petaflop — one quadrillion floating point operations per second — with much higher speed depending on factors such as the application running.

The state-of-the-art 88,000-square-foot facility was largely up and running in summer 2010, when hundreds of people toured the facility north of the UI Research Park.

The NCSA has said that other vendors could move into that facility. Potential vendors include U.S. companies such as NVIDIA, Cray and SGI.

Whether that can be done within its budget — $208 million from the NSF, $100 million from the state — is open to question.

Horst Simon, the deputy director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, told The News-Gazette last week that the federally funded foundation has a history of underfunding some projects and expecting corporations or government bodies to make up the difference.