An Overview of the BlueGene/L Supercomputer

TLDR

This is a jointly funded research partnership between IBM and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as part of the United States Department of Energy ASCI Advanced Architecture Research Program. This paper gives an overview of the BlueGene/L Supercomputer. The BlueGene/L is a massively parallel system of 65,536 nodes built on a new architecture that exploits system‑on‑chip technology to deliver a target peak processing power of 360 teraFLOPS. Application performance and scaling studies have been initiated with partners such as the San Diego Supercomputer Center and Caltech, and the machine is expected to be operational in 2004–2005, achieving price/performance and power consumption/performance targets unattainable by conventional architectures.

Abstract

This paper gives an overview of the BlueGene/L Supercomputer. This is a jointly funded research partnership between IBM and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as part of the United States Department of Energy ASCI Advanced Architecture Research Program. Application performance and scaling studies have recently been initiated with partners at a number of academic and government institutions, including the San Diego Supercomputer Center and the California Institute of Technology. This massively parallel system of 65,536 nodes is based on a new architecture that exploits system-on-a-chip technology to deliver target peak processing power of 360 teraFLOPS (trillion floating-point operations per second). The machine is scheduled to be operational in the 2004--2005 time frame, at price/performance and power consumption/performance targets unobtainable with conventional architectures.