Overview of the IBM Blue Gene/P project

Abstract

On June 26, 2007, IBM announced the Blue Gene/P™ system as the leading offering in its massively parallel Blue Gene® supercomputer line, succeeding the Blue Gene/L™ system. The Blue Gene/P system is designed to scale to at least 262,144 quad-processor nodes, with a peak performance of 3.56 petaflops. More significantly, the Blue Gene/P system enables this unprecedented scaling via architectural and design choices that maximize performance per watt, performance per square foot, and mean time between failures. This paper describes our vision of this petascale system, that is, a system capable of delivering more than a quadrillion (10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">15</sup> ) floating-point operations per second. We also provide an overview of the system architecture, packaging, system software, and initial benchmark results.