Porting Ordinary Applications to Blue Gene/Q Supercomputers

Conference · Mon Aug 31 00:00:00 EDT 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/eScience.2015.8· OSTI ID:1352508

Maheshwari, Ketan C.; Wozniak, Justin M.; Armstrong, Timothy; Katz, Daniel S.; Binkowski, T. Andrew; Zhong, Xiaoliang; Heinonen, Olle; Karpeyev, Dmitry; Wilde, Michael

Efficiently porting ordinary applications to Blue Gene/Q supercomputers is a significant challenge. Codes are often originally developed without considering advanced architectures and related tool chains. Science needs frequently lead users to want to run large numbers of relatively small jobs (often called many-task computing, an ensemble, or a workflow), which can conflict with supercomputer configurations. In this paper, we discuss techniques developed to execute ordinary applications over leadership class supercomputers. We use the high-performance Swift parallel scripting framework and build two workflow execution techniques-sub-jobs and main-wrap. The sub-jobs technique, built on top of the IBM Blue Gene/Q resource manager Cobalt's sub-block jobs, lets users submit multiple, independent, repeated smaller jobs within a single larger resource block. The main-wrap technique is a scheme that enables C/C++ programs to be defined as functions that are wrapped by a high-performance Swift wrapper and that are invoked as a Swift script. We discuss the needs, benefits, technicalities, and current limitations of these techniques. We further discuss the real-world science enabled by these techniques and the results obtained.

• Research Organization: Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science - Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research; National Science Foundation (NSF)
• DOE Contract Number: AC02-06CH11357
• OSTI ID: 1352508
• Resource Relation: Conference: 11th IEEE International Conference on eScience, 08/31/15 - 09/04/15, Munich, DE
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English