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19/10: Blue Gene: Innovations in parallel computing

Med Bruce Elmegreen, IBM Watson Research Centre

BlueGene/L is a new type of computer designed by IBM for extremely fast IO, internal communications, and floating point computations. A single rack contains 1024 node chips, each of which has 2 processors and 4 floating point units. The sustained computation speed of a rack is around 2.5 Tflops. A rack can also accept up to 128 1-Gbit ethernet IO connections, and it has a three-dimensional torus for internal communications between nodes at 2.8 Gbps in each direction. Many racks may be connected together to make a single large torus, or multiple torii each running their own job.

Bruce Elmegreen joined the IBM Research Division 1984, where he continued to work on star formation and galactic structure. In 1995 his astronomy connections with Dr. Toshikazu Ebisuzaki and others in the GRAPE team at RIKEN, Japan, led to a collaborative project between IBM and RIKEN to design and manufacture the MDGRAPE-2 chip. In 2001, he received the Dannie Heineman Prize of the American Institute of Physics. He received his Ph.D. at Princeton University under the guidance of the late Lyman Spitzer, Jr., and then spent three years as a Junior Fellow at Harvard. He was raised in Milwaukee, and attended the University of Wisconsin as an undergraduate.

Presented in cooperation with the 5th Annual Workshop on Linux Clusters for Super Computing arranged by NSC.

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