BlueGene/L applications: Parallelism On a Massive Scale

  • Authors:

  • Bronis R. De Supinski;Martin Schulz;Vasily V. Bulatov;William Cabot;Bor Chan;Andrew W. Cook;Erik W. Draeger;James N. Glosli;Jeffrey A. Greenough;Keith Henderson;Alison Kubota;Steve Louis;Brian J. Miller;Mehul V. Patel;Thomas E. Spelce;Frederick H. Streitz;Peter L. Williams;Robert K. Yates;Andy Yoo;George Almasi;Gyan Bhanot;Alan Gara;John A. Gunnels;Manish Gupta;Jose Moreira;James Sexton;Bob Walkup;Charles Archer;Francois Gygi;Timothy C. Germann;Kai Kadau;Peter S. Lomdahl;Charles Rendleman;Michael L. Welcome;William Mclendon;Bruce Hendrickson;Franz Franchetti;Stefan Kral;Jürgen Lorenz;Christoph W. Überhuber;Edmond Chow;Ümit Çatalyürek

  • Affiliations:

  • LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY, LIVERMORE, CA 94551, USA,;LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY, LIVERMORE, CA 94551, USA;LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY, LIVERMORE, CA 94551, USA;LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY, LIVERMORE, CA 94551, USA;LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY, LIVERMORE, CA 94551, USA;LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY, LIVERMORE, CA 94551, USA;LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY, LIVERMORE, CA 94551, USA;LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY, LIVERMORE, CA 94551, USA;LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY, LIVERMORE, CA 94551, USA;LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY, LIVERMORE, CA 94551, USA;LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY, LIVERMORE, CA 94551, USA;LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY, LIVERMORE, CA 94551, USA;LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY, LIVERMORE, CA 94551, USA;LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY, LIVERMORE, CA 94551, USA;LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY, LIVERMORE, CA 94551, USA;LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY, LIVERMORE, CA 94551, USA;LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY, LIVERMORE, CA 94551, USA;LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY, LIVERMORE, CA 94551, USA;LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY, LIVERMORE, CA 94551, USA;IBM THOMAS J. WATSON RESEARCH CENTER;IBM THOMAS J. WATSON RESEARCH CENTER;IBM THOMAS J. WATSON RESEARCH CENTER;IBM THOMAS J. WATSON RESEARCH CENTER;IBM THOMAS J. WATSON RESEARCH CENTER;IBM THOMAS J. WATSON RESEARCH CENTER;IBM THOMAS J. WATSON RESEARCH CENTER;IBM THOMAS J. WATSON RESEARCH CENTER;IBM SYSTEMS AND TECHNOLOGY GROUP;UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS;LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY;LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY;LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY;LAWRENCE BERKELEY NATIONAL LABORATORY;LAWRENCE BERKELEY NATIONAL LABORATORY;SANDIA NATIONAL LABORATORIES;SANDIA NATIONAL LABORATORIES;CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY;VIENNA UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY;VIENNA UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY;VIENNA UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY;D. E. SHAW RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT;OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

  • Venue:
  • International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

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 last four Top500 lists 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 such as 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.