Early Experience with Scientific Applications on the Blue Gene/L Supercomputer

Abstract. Blue Gene/L uses a large number of low power processors, together with multiple integrated interconnection networks, to build a supercomputer with low cost, space and power consumption. It uses a novel system software architecture designed with application scalability in mind. However, whether real applications will scale to tens of thousands of processors has been an open question. In this paper, we describe early experience with several applications on a 16,384 node Blue Gene/L system. This study establishes that applications from a broad variety of scientific disciplines can effectively scale to thousands of processors. The results reported in this study represent the highest performance ever demonstrated for most of these applications, and in fact, show effective scaling for the first time ever on thousands of processors.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: EUROPAR
• Authors: George S. Almasi, Gyan Bhanot, Dong Chen, Maria Eleftheriou, Blake G. Fitch, Alan Gara, Robert S. Germain, John A. Gunnels, Manish Gupta, Philip Heidelberger, Michael Pitman, Aleksandr Rayshubskiy, James C. Sexton, Frank Suits, Pavlos Vranas, Robert Walkup, T. J. Christopher Ward, Yuriy Zhestkov, Alessandro Curioni, Wanda Andreoni, Charles Archer, José E. Moreira, Richard Loft, Henry M. Tufo, Theron Voran, Katherine Riley
• Keywords: Blue Gene/L, EUROPAR 2005, Low Power Processors, Multiple Integrated Interconnection