Blue Gene

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This article is about the supercomputer. For the musician, see 'Blue' Gene Tyranny.

A BlueGene/L cabinet

Blue Gene is a computer architecture project designed to produce several next-generation supercomputers, designed to reach operating speeds in the petaflops range, and currently reaching sustained speeds over 360 teraflops. It is a cooperative project among IBM (particularly the Thomas J. Watson Research Center), the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the United States Department of Energy (which is partially funding the project), and academia. There are four Blue Gene projects in development: BlueGene/L, BlueGene/C, BlueGene/P, and BlueGene/Q.

1 Blue Gene/L
2 Cyclops64 (BlueGene/C)
3 Blue Gene/P
4 Blue Gene/Q
5 External links and sources
6 See also

[edit] Blue Gene/L

The first computer in the Blue Gene series, Blue Gene/L, developed through a partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), has a theoretical peak performance of 360 TFLOPS, and scores over 280 TFLOPS sustained on the Linpack benchmark.

A note on Nomenclature: The term BlueGene/L sometimes refers to the computer installed at LLNL, and sometimes refers to the architecture of that computer. As of November 2006, there are at least two other computers on the Top500 list using the Blue Gene/L architecture in addition to the number one computer at LLNL. All three of these computers are listed as having an architecture of eServer Blue Gene Solution.

[edit] History

The block scheme of the BlueGene/L ASIC including dual PowerPC 440 cores.

In December 1999, IBM announced $100 Million research initiative of a five-year effort to build a massively parallel computer, to be applied to the study of biomolecular phenomena such as protein folding. The project has two main goals: to advance our understanding of the mechanisms behind protein folding via large-scale simulation, and to explore novel ideas in massively parallel machine architecture and software. This project should enable biomolecular simulations that are orders of magnitude larger than current technology permits. Major areas of investigation include: how most effectively to utilize this novel platform to meet our scientific goals, how to make such massively parallel machines more usable, and how to achieve performance targets, with reasonable cost, through novel machine architectures. In theory, at least, Blue Gene is suitable for developing designer genes, to be built with recombinant DNA technology.

In November 2001, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory joined IBM as a research partner for Blue Gene.

On September 29, 2004, IBM announced that a Blue Gene/L prototype at IBM Rochester (Minnesota) had overtaken NEC's Earth Simulator as the fastest computer in the world, with a speed of 36.01 TFLOPS on the Linpack benchmark, beating Earth Simulator's 35.86 TFLOPS. This was achieved with an 8-cabinet system, with each cabinet holding 1,024 compute nodes. Upon doubling this configuration to 16 cabinets, the machine reached a speed of 70.72 TFLOPS by November 2004, taking first place in the Top500 list.

On March 24, 2005, the US Department of Energy announced that the Blue Gene/L installation at LLNL broke its speed record, reaching 135.5 TFLOPS. This feat was possible because of doubling the number of cabinets to 32.

On the June 2006 Top500 list, Blue Gene/L installations across several sites world-wide took 3 out of the 10 top positions, and 13 out of the top 64. Three racks of BlueGene/L are available at the San Diego Supercomputer Center and are available for academic research.

On October 27, 2005, LLNL and IBM announced that Blue Gene/L had once again broken its speed record, reaching 280.6 TFLOPS on Linpack, upon reaching its final configuration of 65,536 "Compute Nodes" (i.e., 2¹⁶ nodes) and an additional 1024 "IO nodes" in 64 air-cooled cabinets.

BlueGene/L is also the first supercomputer ever to run over 100 TFLOPS sustained on a real world application, namely a three-dimensional molecular dynamics code (ddcMD), simulating solidification (nucleation and growth processes) of molten metal under high pressure and temperature conditions. This won the 2005 Gordon Bell Prize.

On June 22, 2006, NNSA and IBM announced that Blue Gene/L has achieved 207.3 TFLOPS on a quantum chemical application (Qbox). [1]

On Nov 14, 2006, at Supercomputing 2006 SC06, Blue Gene/L has been awarded the winning prize in all HPC Challenge Classes of awards. [2]

[edit] Major features

Blue Gene/L supercomputer is unique in the following aspects:

Trade the speed of processors for low power consumption.
Dual processor per node with two working modes: co-processor (1 user process/node: computation and communication work is shared by two processors) and virtual node (2 user processes/node)
system-on-a-chip design
a large number of nodes (65,536)
three-dimensional torus interconnect with auxiliary networks for global communications, I/O, and management
Lightweight OS per node for minimum system overhead (computational noise)

[edit] Architecture

One BlueGene/L node card

Each Compute or IO node is a single ASIC with associated DRAM memory chips. The ASIC integrates two 700 MHz PowerPC 440 embedded processors, each with a double-pipeline-double-precision Floating Point Unit (FPU), a cache sub-system with built-in DRAM controller and the logic to support multiple communication sub-systems. The dual FPUs give each BlueGene/L node a theoretical peak performance of 5.6 GFLOPS. Node CPUs are not cache coherent with one another.

By integration of all essential sub-systems on a single chip, each Compute or IO node dissipates low power (about 17 watts, including DRAMs). This allows very aggressive packaging of up to 1024 Compute nodes plus additional IO nodes in a standard 19" cabinet, within reasonable limits of electrical power supply and air cooling. The performance metrics in terms of FLOPS per Watt, FLOPS per m² of floorspace and FLOPS per unit cost allow scaling up to very high performance.

Each Blue Gene/L node is attached to three parallel communications networks: a 3D toroidal network for peer-to-peer communication between compute nodes, a collective network for collective communication, and a global interrupt network for fast barriers. The I/O nodes, which run the Linux operating system, provide communication with the world via an Ethernet network. Finally, a separate and private Ethernet network provides access to any node for configuration, booting and diagnostics.

Two other networks are also available: one is the Gbit/s Ethernet network connecting compute and I/O nodes; the other is the JTAG network for booting, control and monitoring purposes.

Blue Gene/L Compute nodes use a minimal operating system supporting a single user program. Only a subset of POSIX calls are supported, and only one process may be run at a time. Programmers need to implement green threads in order to simulate local concurrency.

To allow multiple programs to run concurrently, a 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, and must contain at least 2⁵ = 32 nodes. The maximum partition is all nodes in the computer. To run a program on Blue Gene/L, a partition of the computer must first be reserved. The program is then run on all the nodes within the partition, and no other program may access nodes within the partition while it is in use. Upon completion, the partition nodes are released for future programs to use.

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.

[edit] Cyclops64 (BlueGene/C)

Main article: Cyclops64

BlueGene/C (now renamed to Cyclops64) is a sister-project to BlueGene/L. It is a massively parallel, supercomputer-on-a-chip cellular architecture. It is slated for release in late 2006 or early 2007.