SC Conference - Activity Details

Sadaf Alam  (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

Richard Barrett  (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

Michael Bast  (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

Mark Fahey  (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

Jeffrey Kuehn  (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

Collin McCurdy  (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

James Rogers  (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

Philip Roth  (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

Ramanan Sankaran  (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

Jeffrey Vetter  (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

Patrick Worley  (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

Weikuan Yu  (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

Large-Scale System Performance

Tuesday,  04:00PM - 04:30PM

Room Ballroom E

BlueGene/P (BGP) is the second generation BlueGene architecture from IBM, succeeding BlueGene/L (BGL). BGP is a system-on-a-chip (SoC) design that uses four PowerPC 450 cores operating at 850 MHz with a double precision, dual pipe floating point unit per core. These chips are connected with multiple interconnection networks including a 3-D torus, a global collective network, and a global barrier network. In this paper, we report on our examination of BGP, presented in the context of a set of important scientific applications, and as it compares to other major large scale supercomputers in use today. Our investigation confirms that BGP has good scalability with an expected lower performance per processor when compared to the Cray XT4’s Opteron. We also find that BGP uses very low power per floating point operation for certain kernels, yet it has less of a power advantage when considering science-based metrics for mission applications.

The full paper can be found in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library and ACM Digital Library