Blue gene

Blue gene

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  BLUE GENE Sunitha M. Jenarius
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  What is BlueGene A massively parallel supercomputer using tens of thousands of embedded PowerPC processors supporting a large memory space  With standard compilers and message passing environment
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  Why the name“Blue Gene”?  “Blue”: The corporate color of IBM  “Gene”: The intended use of the Blue Gene clusters – Computational biology, specifically, protein folding
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  History  Dec’99, IBM Research announced $100M US effort to build a Petaflop scale supercomputer.  Two goals of The Blue Gene project : – Massively parallel machine architecture and software – Bio-Molecular Simulation – advance orders of magnitude  November 2001, Partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and this resulted in …
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  Results  Linpack Top 500 Supercomputers
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  Blue Gene Projects Four Blue Gene projects : – BlueGene/L – BlueGene/C – BlueGene/P – BlueGene/Q
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  Blue Gene/L  The first computer in the Blue Gene series  IBM first announced the Blue Gene/L project, Sept. 29, 2004  Final configuration was launched in October 2005
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  Blue Gene/L -Unsurpassed Performance  Designed to deliver the most performance per kilowatt of power consumed  Theoretical peak performance of 360 TFLOPS  Final Configuration (Oct. ‘05) scores over 280 TFLOPS sustained on the Linpack benchmark.  Nov 14, ‘06, at Supercomputing 2006, Blue Gene/L was awarded the winning prize in all HPC Challenge Classes of awards.
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  Blue Gene/L Architecture Can be scaled up to 65,536 compute or I/O nodes, with 131,072 processors  Each node is a single ASIC with associated DRAM memory chips  Each ASIC has 2 700 MHz IBM PowerPC processors  PowerPC processors – Low-frequency, low-power embedded processors, superior to today's high-frequency, high-power microprocessors by a factor of 2 or more
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  Blue Gene/L Architecturecontd… – Double-pipeline-double-precision Floating Point Unit – A cache sub-system with built-in DRAM controller  Node CPUs are not cache coherent with one another  FPUs and CPUs are designed for low power consumption – Using transistors with low leakage current – Local clock gating – Putting the FPU or CPU/FPU pair to sleep
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  Blue Gene/L Architecturecontd… 1024 nodes System Overview
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  Blue Gene/L Architecturecontd… 1 rack holds 1024 nodes or 2048 processors  Nodes optimized for low power consumption  ASIC based on System-on-a-chip technology – Large numbers of low-power system-on-a-chip technology allows it to outperform commodity clusters while saving on power – Aggressive packaging of processors, memory and interconnect – Power Efficient & Space Efficient – Allows for latencies and bandwidths that are significantly better than those for nodes typically used in ASC scale supercomputers
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  Blue Gene/L Networks Each node is attached to 3 main parallel communication networks – 3D Torus network - peer-2-peer between compute nodes – Collective network – collective & global communication – Ethernet network - I/O and management (such as access to any node for configuration, booting and diagnostics )
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  Blue Gene/L SystemSoftware  System software supports efficient execution of parallel applications  Compiler support for DFPU (C, C++, Fortran)  Compute nodes use a minimal operating system called “BlueGene/L compute node kernel” – A lightweight, single-user operating system – Supports execution of a single dual-threaded application compute process – Kernel provides a single and static virtual address space to one running compute process – Because of single-process nature, no context switching required
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  Blue Gene/L SystemSoftware contd…  To allow multiple programs to run concurrently – Blue Gene/L system can be partitioned into electronically isolated sets of nodes – The number of nodes in a partition must be a positive integer power of 2 – To run program – reserve this partition – No other program can use till partition is done with current program – With so many nodes, component failures are inevitable. The system is able to electrically isolate faulty hardware to allow the machine to continue to run
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  Blue Gene/L SystemSoftware contd…  Parallel Programming model – Message Passing – supported through an implementation of MPI – Only a subset of POSIX calls are supported – Green threads are also used to simulate local concurrency
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  Blue Gene/C  Sister-project to BlueGene/L  Renamed to Cyclops64  Massively parallel, supercomputer-on-a-chip cellular architecture  Cellular architecture gives the programmer the ability to run large numbers of concurrent threads within a single processor.
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  Blue Gene/P  Architecturally similar to BlueGene/L  Expected to operate around one petaflop  Expected around 2008
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  Blue Gene/Q  Lastknown supercomputer in the Blue Gene series  Expected to reach 3-10 petaflops
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  Resources  Wikipedia.org  IBM website – ( www.03.ibm.com/servers/deepcomputing/bluegene.htm )  www.supercomp.org/sc2002/paperpdfs/pap.p ap207.pdf