Presented By : M Chandra Sekhar Reddy 09Q61A0525

What is Blue Gene ?

A supercomputer with thousands of embedded PowerPC

processors supporting a large memory space with standard compilers and message passing environment.
Blue Gene" is an ambitious project of IBM to expand the horizons

of supercomputing and perform

one petaflop per sec.

The first supercomputer to beat

human in chess.

Why the name Blue Gene?

Blue

: The corporate color of IBM

This supercomputer was initially used to study the model of human proteins folding.

Gene :

History
In December 1999 , IBM announced to build a massively parallel computer, to be applied to study the protein gene sequence. Major areas of investigation included:
The use of this novel platform to meet scientific goals Making of parallel machines more usable Achieving performance targets at reasonable cost through a

novel machine architecture.

Results
Linpack Top 500 Supercomputers

Stages of Blue Gene Project

Four stages of Blue Gene project :
BlueGene/L

BlueGene/C
BlueGene/P BlueGene/Q

Blue Gene/L
The first computer in the Blue Gene series .
Designed to deliver the most performance per kilowatt of power

consumed.
It is a 16 rack system, with each rack holding 1024 compute nodes

and a LINPAC performance of 70.72 *TFLOPS.

Theoretical peak performance is 360 TFLOPS .

*TFLOPS -A tflop , or teraflop, is a parallel supercomputing system that has the ability to compute one trillion floating point operations per second.

Blue Gene/L Architecture

Contains 65,536 compute or I/O nodes, with 131,072 processors Each node is single ASIC with associated DRAM memory chips Each ASIC has two 700 MHz IBM PowerPC processors PowerPC processors
Low-frequency, low-power embedded processors Double-pipeline-double-precision Floating Point Unit A cache sub-system with built-in DRAM controller

Node CPUs are not cache coherent with one another

FPUs and CPUs are designed for low power consumption
Using transistors with low leakage current

Blue Gene/L Architecture contd

1024 nodes

System Overview

Blue Gene/L Networks

Each node is attached to 3 main parallel communication

networks
3D Torus network - peer-2-peer between compute nodes
Collective network collective & global communication Ethernet network - I/O and management (such as access to

any node for configuration, booting and diagnostics )

Blue Gene/L System Software

Software supports efficient execution of parallel applications Compiler support for *DFPU (C, C++, Fortran) Compute nodes use a minimal operating system called

BlueGene/L compute node kernel

A lightweight, single-user operating system Supports execution of a single dual-threaded application compute process Kernel provides a single and static virtual address space to a running

process Because of single-process nature, no context switching required

DFPU - Double Floating Point Unit

Blue Gene/L System Software contd

To allow multiple programs to run concurrently
Blue Gene/L system can be partitioned into electronically isolated sets of

nodes The number of nodes in a partition must be a positive integer power of 2 To run program reserve this partition No other program can use till partition is done with current program With so many nodes, component failures are inevitable. The system is able to electrically isolate faulty hardware to allow the machine to continue to run

Parallel Programming model

Message Passing supported through an implementation of MPI Only a subset of POSIX calls are supported Green threads are also used to simulate local concurrency

Blue Gene/C
Sister-project to BlueGene/L and renamed to Cyclops64

Massively parallel with cellular architecture called as

supercomputer-on-a-chip Cellular architecture gives the programmer the ability to run large numbers of concurrent threads within a single processor.

Blue Gene/P
Launched in 2008 and architecturally similar to BlueGene /L . Expected to operate around one petaflop. In here, the cores are cache coherent and the chip can operate

as a 4-way symmetric multi-processor. The memory subsystem on the chip consist of small private L2 caches , a central shared 8 MB L3 cache , and dual DDR2 memory controllers.

Blue Gene/Q
Third and the Last known supercomputer in the Blue Gene

series and enhancement to the blue gene/L and P architecture.

Launched in 2012 and expected to reach 20 petaflops.