Blue Gene is a massively parallel supercomputer developed by IBM that uses tens of thousands of embedded PowerPC processors and large memory to support computationally intensive tasks like protein folding. The first Blue Gene project, Blue Gene/L, achieved over 280 teraflops of performance and set efficiency records. Subsequent Blue Gene projects, including Blue Gene/P and Blue Gene/Q, aimed for even higher petaflop-scale performance using similar highly parallel, low-power architectures and system software.

1. BLUE GENE
Sunitha M. Jenarius

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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 …

5. Results
 Linpack Top 500 Supercomputers

6. Blue Gene Projects
 Four Blue Gene projects :
– BlueGene/L
– BlueGene/C
– BlueGene/P
– BlueGene/Q

7. 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

8. 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.

9. 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

10. 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

11. Blue Gene/L Architecture contd…
1024 nodes
System Overview

12. 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

13. 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 )

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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.

18. Blue Gene/P
 Architecturally
similar to BlueGene/L
 Expected to operate around one petaflop
 Expected around 2008

19. Blue Gene/Q
 Last known supercomputer in the Blue Gene
series
 Expected to reach 3-10 petaflops

20. Resources
 Wikipedia.org
 IBM website
– (
www.03.ibm.com/servers/deepcomputing/bluegene.htm
)
 www.supercomp.org/sc2002/paperpdfs/pap.p
ap207.pdf