BLUE GENE

Sunitha M. Jenarius
What is Blue Gene

 A massively parallel supercomputer using

tens of thousands of embedded PowerPC
processors supporting a large memory space
 With standard compilers
and message passing
environment
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
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 …

Results

 Linpack Top 500 Supercomputers

Blue Gene Projects

 Four Blue Gene projects :

– BlueGene/L
– BlueGene/C
– BlueGene/P
– BlueGene/Q
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
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.
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
Blue Gene/L Architecture contd…

– 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
Blue Gene/L Architecture contd…

1024 nodes

System Overview
Blue Gene/L Architecture contd…

 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
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 )
Blue Gene/L System Software

 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
Blue Gene/L System Software 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
Blue Gene/L System Software 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
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.
Blue Gene/P

 Architecturally similar to BlueGene/L

 Expected to operate around one petaflop
 Expected around 2008
Blue Gene/Q

 Last known supercomputer in the Blue Gene

series
 Expected to reach 3-10 petaflops
Resources

 Wikipedia.org
 IBM website
– (
www.03.ibm.com/servers/deepcomputing/bluegen
e.html
)
 www.supercomp.org/sc2002/paperpdfs/pap.p
ap207.pdf