The document summarizes IBM's Blue Gene/L supercomputer. It discusses that Blue Gene/L was created in 1999 through a partnership between IBM and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to build a scalable supercomputer optimized for bandwidth. It had 65,536 dual-processor nodes, 512 MB of memory per node, and used a 3D torus network topology to interconnect the nodes. Its main applications included protein folding, modeling the human brain, and other scientific problems.

1. BLUE GENE/L Sapnah Aligeti CMPS 5433

2. Outline History about supercomputers Manufacturers / Partners of Blue Gene/L Why was it created? Who are the customers? How much does it cost? Processors / Memory / Scalability Stepwise Structure Hardware Architecture Interconnection Network Software Advantages Applications

3. A LITTLE ABOUT SUPERCOMPUTERS…… IBM’s Naval Ordnance Research Calculator. IBM's Blue Gene/L.

4. …… A LITTLE ABOUT SUPERCOMPUTERS (CONTD) 360000000000000 floating-point operations per second (TFLOPS) in March, 2005. 15,000 operations per second.

5. …… A LITTLE ABOUT SUPERCOMPUTERS (CONTD)

6. MANUFACTURER / PARTNERS 1999 - 100M $ PROJECT BY IBM FOR THE US DEPT OF ENERGY (DOE) - BLUE GENE/L - BLUE GENE/C (CYCLOPS) - BLUE GENE/P (PETAFLOPS) 2001 - PARTNERSHIP WITH LAWRENCE LIVEMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY (FIRST CUSTOMER)

7. TWO MAIN GOALS OF BLUE GENE/L to build a new family of supercomputers optimized for bandwidth, scalability and the ability to handle large amounts of data while consuming a fraction of the power and floor space required by today's fastest systems. to analyze scientific and biological problems (protein folding).

8. CUSTOMERS 64 rack machine to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California 23 Feb 2004 – 6 rack machine to ASTRON, a leading astronomy organization in the Netherlands to use IBM's Blue Gene/L supercomputer technology as the basis to develop a new type of radio telescope capable of looking back billions of years in time. May/June 2004 – 1 rack system to Argonne National Laboratory, Illinois Sept 2004 IBM - 4 rack Blue Gene/L supercomputer to Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) to investigate the shapes of proteins. 6 Jun 2005 - 4 rack machine to The Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), in Lausanne, Switzerland to simulate the workings of the human brain .

9. COST The initial cost was 1.5 M $/rack The current cost is 2M $/rack March 2005 – IBM started renting the machine for about $10,000 per week to use one-eighth of a Blue Gene/L rack.

10. PROCESSORS / MEMORY / SCALABILITY PROCESSOR 65,536 DUAL PROCESSOR NODES. 700 MHZ POWER PC 440 PROCESSOR. MEMORY 512 MB of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) per node. SCALABILITY BLUE GENE/L IS JUST THE FIRST STEP………

11. THE BLUE GENE/L THE STEPWISE STRUCTURE……

12. THE BLUE GENE/L

13. THE BLUE GENE/L THE RACK/CABINET

14. THE BLUE GENE/L THE NODE CARD

15. THE BLUE GENE/L THE COMPUTE CARD

16. THE BLUE GENE/L THE CHIP

17. THE BLUE GENE/L

18. THE BLUE GENE/L

19. THE BLUE GENE/L

20. BLUE GENE/L I/O ARCHITECTURE Architecture: Top view:

21. HARDWARE 65,356 Compute nodes ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) ASIC includes two 32-bit PowerPC 440 processing cores, each with two 64-bit FPUs (Floating-Point Units) compute nodes strictly handle computations 1024 i/o nodes manages communications for a group of 64 compute nodes. 5 Network connections

22. Interconnection Network 3D Torus Global tree Global interrupts Ethernet Control

23. 3D TORUS n/w FOR 64 NODES (4 * 4 * 4) http://hpc.csie.thu.edu.tw/docs/Tutorial.pdf

24. Torus n/w (contd) Primary connection Torus n/w connects all the 65,536 compute nodes (32 * 32 * 64). One node connects to 6 other nodes. Chosen because provides high bandwidth nearest neighbor connectivity Single node consists of single ASIC and memory. Dynamic adaptive routing.

25. SOFTWARE The main parallel programming model for BG/L is message passing using MPI (message passing interface) in C, C++, or FORTRAN. Supports global address space programming models such as Co-Array FORTRAN (CAF) and Unified Parallel C (UPC). The I/O and external front-end nodes run Linux, and the compute nodes run a kernel that is inspired by Linux.

26. Advantages Scalable Less space (half of the tennis court) Heat problems most supercomputers face Speed

27. Limitations Memory Limitation (512 MB/node) Simple node kernel (does not support forks, threads)

28. Applications BLUE BRAIN PROJECT, 6 JUNE IBM and Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), in Switzerland to study the behavior of the brain and model it. PROTEIN FOLDING Alzheimer’s disease

29. Future developments???? Article published in “THE STANDARD”, china’s business newspaper dated May 29 Military hopes such a development will allow pilots to control jets using their mind Allow wheelchair users to walk

30. References IBM, Journal of Research and Development, volume 49, November 2005. Goolge News. http://www.linuxworld.com/read/48131.htm http://sc-2002.org/paperpdfs/pap.pap207.pdf http://www.ipab.org/Presentation/sem04/04-02-2.pdf http://www.desy.de/dvsem/WS0405/steinmacherBurow-20050221.pdf www.scd.ucar.edu/info/UserForum/presentations/loft.ppt

31. THANK YOU!! QUESTIONS???

32. ASIC

33. GENERAL CONNECTION

34. What is a kernel?? In computer science, the kernel is the fundamental part of an operating system. It is a piece of software responsible for providing secure access to the machine's hardware to various computer programs. Since there are many programs, and access to the hardware is limited, the kernel is also responsible for deciding when and how long a program should be able to make use of a piece of hardware, which is called multiplexing. Accessing the hardware directly can be very complex, so kernels usually implement some hardware abstractions to hide complexity and provide a clean and uniform interface to the underlying hardware, which helps application programmers.