Enabling Dual-Core Mode in BlueGene/L: Challenges and Solutions

  • Authors:

  • George Almási;Leonardo R. Bachega;Siddhartha Chatterjee;Manish Gupta;Derek Lieber;Xavier Martorell;José E. Moreira

  • Affiliations:

  • -;-;-;-;-;-;-

  • Venue:
  • SBAC-PAD '03 Proceedings of the 15th Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing
  • Year:
  • 2003

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

BlueGene/L is a massively parallel computer system with 65,536 dual-processor compute nodes. The peak performance of BlueGene/L is in excess of 360 TFLOP/s if both processor cores in a node are used for computation. The main challenge of deploying this dual-core mode of operation is that the L1 caches in each core are not hardware coherent. This forces a software-based approach to cache coherence and guides our design of a programming model for dual-core mode. In this paper, we describe the design, implementation, and performance evaluation of system software for enabling the use of dual-core mode on Blue-Gene/L. Our preliminary performance results show that our approach to dual-core mode is effective for key numerical kernels.