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IBM Blue Gene
Blue Gene was an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with relatively low power consumption.
The project created three generations of supercomputers, Blue Gene/L, Blue Gene/P, and Blue Gene/Q. During their deployment, Blue Gene systems often led the TOP500 and Green500 rankings of the most powerful and most power-efficient supercomputers, respectively. Blue Gene systems have also consistently scored top positions in the Graph500 list. The project was awarded the 2009 National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
After Blue Gene/Q, IBM focused its supercomputer efforts on the OpenPower platform, using accelerators such as FPGAs and GPUs to address the diminishing returns of Moore's law.
A video presentation of the history and technology of the Blue Gene project was given at the Supercomputing 2020 conference.
In December 1999, IBM announced a US$100 million research initiative for a five-year effort to build a massively parallel computer, to be applied to the study of biomolecular phenomena such as protein folding. The research and development was pursued by a large multi-disciplinary team at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, initially led by William R. Pulleyblank. The project had two main goals: to advance understanding of the mechanisms behind protein folding via large-scale simulation, and to explore novel ideas in massively parallel machine architecture and software. Major areas of investigation included: how to use this novel platform to effectively meet its scientific goals, how to make such massively parallel machines more usable, and how to achieve performance targets at a reasonable cost, through novel machine architectures.
The initial design for Blue Gene was based on an early version of the Cyclops64 architecture, designed by Monty Denneau. In parallel, Alan Gara had started working on an extension of the QCDOC architecture into a more general-purpose supercomputer. The US Department of Energy started funding the development of this system and it became known as Blue Gene/L (L for Light). Development of the original Blue Gene architecture continued under the name Blue Gene/C (C for Cyclops) and, later, Cyclops64.
Architecture and chip logic design for the Blue Gene systems was done at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, chip design was completed and chips were manufactured by IBM Microelectronics, and the systems were built at IBM Rochester, MN. Alan Gara was the Chief Architect and Paul Coteus was the Chief Engineer.
In November 2004 a 16-rack system, with each rack holding 1,024 compute nodes, achieved first place in the TOP500 list, with a LINPACK benchmarks performance of 70.72 TFLOPS. It thereby overtook NEC's Earth Simulator, which had held the title of the fastest computer in the world since 2002. From 2004 through 2007 the Blue Gene/L installation at LLNL gradually expanded to 104 racks, achieving 478 TFLOPS Linpack and 596 TFLOPS peak. The LLNL BlueGene/L installation held the first position in the TOP500 list for 3.5 years, until in June 2008 it was overtaken by IBM's Cell-based Roadrunner system at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which was the first system to surpass the 1 PetaFLOPS mark.
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IBM Blue Gene AI simulator
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IBM Blue Gene
Blue Gene was an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with relatively low power consumption.
The project created three generations of supercomputers, Blue Gene/L, Blue Gene/P, and Blue Gene/Q. During their deployment, Blue Gene systems often led the TOP500 and Green500 rankings of the most powerful and most power-efficient supercomputers, respectively. Blue Gene systems have also consistently scored top positions in the Graph500 list. The project was awarded the 2009 National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
After Blue Gene/Q, IBM focused its supercomputer efforts on the OpenPower platform, using accelerators such as FPGAs and GPUs to address the diminishing returns of Moore's law.
A video presentation of the history and technology of the Blue Gene project was given at the Supercomputing 2020 conference.
In December 1999, IBM announced a US$100 million research initiative for a five-year effort to build a massively parallel computer, to be applied to the study of biomolecular phenomena such as protein folding. The research and development was pursued by a large multi-disciplinary team at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, initially led by William R. Pulleyblank. The project had two main goals: to advance understanding of the mechanisms behind protein folding via large-scale simulation, and to explore novel ideas in massively parallel machine architecture and software. Major areas of investigation included: how to use this novel platform to effectively meet its scientific goals, how to make such massively parallel machines more usable, and how to achieve performance targets at a reasonable cost, through novel machine architectures.
The initial design for Blue Gene was based on an early version of the Cyclops64 architecture, designed by Monty Denneau. In parallel, Alan Gara had started working on an extension of the QCDOC architecture into a more general-purpose supercomputer. The US Department of Energy started funding the development of this system and it became known as Blue Gene/L (L for Light). Development of the original Blue Gene architecture continued under the name Blue Gene/C (C for Cyclops) and, later, Cyclops64.
Architecture and chip logic design for the Blue Gene systems was done at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, chip design was completed and chips were manufactured by IBM Microelectronics, and the systems were built at IBM Rochester, MN. Alan Gara was the Chief Architect and Paul Coteus was the Chief Engineer.
In November 2004 a 16-rack system, with each rack holding 1,024 compute nodes, achieved first place in the TOP500 list, with a LINPACK benchmarks performance of 70.72 TFLOPS. It thereby overtook NEC's Earth Simulator, which had held the title of the fastest computer in the world since 2002. From 2004 through 2007 the Blue Gene/L installation at LLNL gradually expanded to 104 racks, achieving 478 TFLOPS Linpack and 596 TFLOPS peak. The LLNL BlueGene/L installation held the first position in the TOP500 list for 3.5 years, until in June 2008 it was overtaken by IBM's Cell-based Roadrunner system at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which was the first system to surpass the 1 PetaFLOPS mark.
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