Overview of the Blue Gene/L system architecture

TLDR

Blue Gene/L is a massively parallel supercomputer built on IBM system‑on‑chip technology, scalable to 65,536 dual‑processor nodes with a peak performance of 360 teraflops. The paper outlines the project objectives and provides an overview of the system architecture. The authors describe an application‑driven, low‑power, highly integrated design featuring a link chip, five interconnect networks, a PowerPC 440 core with floating‑point enhancements, on‑chip and off‑chip distributed memory, and node‑ and system‑level reliability and fault‑isolation strategies.

Abstract

The Blue Gene®/L computer is a massively parallel supercomputer based on IBM system-on-a-chip technology. It is designed to scale to 65,536 dual-processor nodes, with a peak performance of 360 teraflops. This paper describes the project objectives and provides an overview of the system architecture that resulted. We discuss our application-based approach and rationale for a low-power, highly integrated design. The key architectural features of Blue Gene/L are introduced in this paper: the link chip component and five Blue Gene/L networks, the PowerPC® 440 core and floating-point enhancements, the on-chip and off-chip distributed memory system, the node- and system-level design for high reliability, and the comprehensive approach to fault isolation.