Blue Gene is a massively parallel supercomputer architecture developed by IBM using embedded PowerPC processors. It was named Blue Gene due to IBM's corporate color and its intended use for computational biology and protein folding. Major Blue Gene projects include Blue Gene/L, Blue Gene/C, Blue Gene/P, and Blue Gene/Q. Blue Gene/L was the first in the series and set performance records, achieving over 280 teraflops using a large number of low-power nodes connected by a 3D torus network. The Blue Gene architecture emphasizes low power consumption by using embedded processors designed for efficiency.

1. Seminar
On
Blue Gene
Submitted By:
Rabindra Raj Sah

2. Content
 What is Blue Gene
 Why the name “Blue Gene”?
 History
 Results
 Blue Gene Projects
 References

3. 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

4. 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

5. History
 Dec1999, 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)

6.  Trading the speed of processors for lower power consumption. Blue
Gene/L used low frequency and low power embedded PowerPC cores
with floating point accelerators. While the performance of each chip
was relatively low, the system could achieve better performance to
energy ratio, for applications that could use larger numbers of nodes.
 Dual processors per node with two working modes: co-processor mode
where one processor handles computation and the other handles
communication; and virtual-node mode, where both processors are
available to run user code, but the processors share both the
computation and the communication load.
 System-on-a-chip design. All node components were embedded on one
chip, with the exception of 512 MB external DRAM.
 A large number of nodes (scalable in increments of 1024 up to at least
65,536) Three-dimensional torus interconnect with auxiliary
networks for global communications (broadcast and reductions), I/O,
and management .
MAJOR FEATURES

7. Results
 Linpack Top 500 Supercomputers

8. Blue Gene Projects
 Four Blue Gene projects :
 BlueGene/L
 BlueGene/C
 BlueGene/P
 BlueGene/Q

9. 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

10. 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.

11. 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

12. 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

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

14. 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

15. 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 )

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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

19. References
 www.google.com
 www.wikipedia.com
 www.studymafia.org

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