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Determination of performance characteristics of scientific applications on IBM Blue Gene/Q

Journal Article · · IBM Journal of Research and Development
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  1. IBM Research Division, Cambridge, MA (United States)
  2. IBM, Yorktown Heights, NY (United States). Thomas J. Watson Research Center
  3. Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL (United States). Computer Science Dept.

The IBM Blue Gene®/Q platform presents scientists and engineers with a rich set of hardware features such as 16 cores per chip sharing a Level 2 cache, a wide SIMD (single-instruction, multiple-data) unit, a five-dimensional torus network, and hardware support for collective operations. Especially important is the feature related to cores that have four “hardware threads,” which makes it possible to hide latencies and obtain a high fraction of the peak issue rate from each core. All of these hardware resources present unique performance-tuning opportunities on Blue Gene/Q. We provide an overview of several important applications and solvers and study them on Blue Gene/Q using performance counters and Message Passing Interface profiles. We also discuss how Blue Gene/Q tools help us understand the interaction of the application with the hardware and software layers and provide guidance for optimization. Furthermore, on the basis of our analysis, we discuss code improvement strategies targeting Blue Gene/Q. Information about how these algorithms map to the Blue Gene® architecture is expected to have an impact on future system design as we move to the exascale era.

Research Organization:
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, CA
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
DOE Contract Number:
AC52-07NA27344
OSTI ID:
1226973
Report Number(s):
LLNL-JRNL--580932
Journal Information:
IBM Journal of Research and Development, Journal Name: IBM Journal of Research and Development Journal Issue: 1/2 Vol. 57; ISSN 0018-8646
Publisher:
IEEE
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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