Early Evaluation of IBM BlueGene/P

Conference · Tue Jan 01 00:00:00 EST 2008

OSTI ID:1003732

Alam, Sadaf R ^[1]; Barrett, Richard F ^[1]; Bast, Michael H ^[1]; Fahey, Mark R ^[1]; Kuehn, Jeffery A ^[1]; McCurdy, Collin B ^[1]; Rogers, James H ^[1]; Roth, Philip C ^[1]; Sankaran, Ramanan ^[1]; Vetter, Jeffrey S ^[1]; Worley, Patrick H ^[1]; Yu, Weikuan ^[1]

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1. ORNL

BlueGene/P (BG/P) is the second generation BlueGene architecture from IBM, succeeding BlueGene/L (BG/L). BG/P is a system-on-a-chip (SoC) design that uses four PowerPC 450 cores operating at 850 MHz with a double precision, dual pipe floating point unit per core. These chips are connected with multiple interconnection networks including a 3-D torus, a global collective network, and a global barrier network. The design is intended to provide a highly scalable, physically dense system with relatively low power requirements per flop. In this paper, we report on our examination of BG/P, presented in the context of a set of important scientific applications, and as compared to other major large scale supercomputers in use today. Our investigation confirms that BG/P has good scalability with an expected lower performance per processor when compared to the Cray XT4 s Opteron. We also find that BG/P uses very low power per floating point operation for certain kernels, yet it has less of a power advantage when considering science-driven metrics for mission applications.

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC)
• DOE Contract Number: DE-AC05-00OR22725
• OSTI ID: 1003732
• Resource Relation: Conference: SuperComputing 2008, Austin, TX, USA, 20081115, 20081121
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS//MATHEMATICS, COMPUTING, AND INFORMATION SCIENCE
ACCURACY
COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE
DESIGN
EVALUATION
KERNELS
METRICS
PERFORMANCE
SUPERCOMPUTERS