Don Darrell Reed

The blue gene/L supercomputer: a hardware and software story

The Blue Gene/L system at the Department of Energy Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California is the world’s most powerful supercomputer. It has achieved groundbreaking performance in both standard benchmarks as well as real scientific applications. In that process, it has enabled new science that simply could not be done before. Blue Gene/L was developed by a relatively small team of dedicated scientists and engineers. This article is both a description of the Blue Gene/L supercomputer as well as an account of how that system was designed, developed, and delivered. It reports on the technical characteristics of the system that made it possible to build such a powerful supercomputer. It also reports on how teams across the world worked around the clock to accomplish this milestone of high-performance computing.

A database-centric approach to system management in the Blue Gene/L supercomputer

In designing the management system for Blue Gene/L, we adopted a database-centric approach. All configuration and operational data for a particular Blue Gene/L system are stored in a relational database that is kept in the systems service node. The database also serves as the communication bus for the various processes implementing the management system. This design offers many advantages, including the ability to use SQL commands to retrieve reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) information about the system. Information about machine partitioning and user jobs can be obtained the same way. Leveraging the database, we have developed a Web interface for system management. This management system has been successfully implemented and deployed in all 19 Blue Gene/L installations at the time of this writing