BlueGene/L Applications: Parallelism on a Massive Scale

Journal Article · Fri Sep 08 04:00:00 EDT 2006 · The International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications, vol. 22, no. 1, February 1, 2008, pp. 33-51

OSTI ID:936971

de Supinski, B R; Schulz, M; Bulatov, V V; Cabot, W; Chan, B; Cook, A W; Draeger, E W; Glosli, J N; Greenough, J A; Henderson, K; Kubota, A; Louis, S; Miller, B J; Patel, M V; Spelce, T E; Streitz, F H; Williams, P L; Yates, R K; Yoo, A; Almasi, G ; Bhanot, G; Gara, A; Gunnels, J A; Gupta, M; Moreira, J; Sexton, J; Walkup, B; Archer, C; Gygi, F; Germann, T C; Kadau, K; Lomdahl, P S; Rendleman, C; Welcome, M L; McLendon, W; Hendrickson, B; Franchetti, F; Lorenz, J; Uberhuber, C W; Chow, E; Catalyurek, U

BlueGene/L (BG/L), developed through a partnership between IBM and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), is currently the world's largest system both in terms of scale with 131,072 processors and absolute performance with a peak rate of 367 TFlop/s. BG/L has led the Top500 list the last four times with a Linpack rate of 280.6 TFlop/s for the full machine installed at LLNL and is expected to remain the fastest computer in the next few editions. However, the real value of a machine like BG/L derives from the scientific breakthroughs that real applications can produce by successfully using its unprecedented scale and computational power. In this paper, we describe our experiences with eight large scale applications on BG/L from several application domains, ranging from molecular dynamics to dislocation dynamics and turbulence simulations to searches in semantic graphs. We also discuss the challenges we faced when scaling these codes and present several successful optimization techniques. All applications show excellent scaling behavior, even at very large processor counts, with one code even achieving a sustained performance of more than 100 TFlop/s, clearly demonstrating the real success of the BG/L design.

• Research Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, CA
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: W-7405-ENG-48
• OSTI ID: 936971
• Report Number(s): UCRL-JRNL-224370
• Journal Information: The International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications, vol. 22, no. 1, February 1, 2008, pp. 33-51, Journal Name: The International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications, vol. 22, no. 1, February 1, 2008, pp. 33-51 Journal Issue: 1 Vol. 22
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
COMPUTERS
DESIGN
DISLOCATIONS
LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY
OPTIMIZATION
PERFORMANCE
TURBULENCE