Welcome to Blue Gene/L - Lawrence Livermore National ... · UCRL-PRES-145618-4 Important points about Blue Gene/L z Embedded technology promises to be an efficient path toward building

UCRL-PRES-145618-1 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory , P. O. Box 808, Livermore, CA 94551

August 13, 2002

Welcome to Blue Gene/L

Presented to

Blue Gene/L ConferenceLake Tahoe, CA

David A. NowakDeputy Associate Director for Defense and Nuclear Technologies

Program Leader for Advanced Simulation and ComputingLawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Expanding Our High-End Computing Universe

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One way of looking at Blue Gene/Lis to look at the physics of scale

10–8 10–4 0.01 110–10 10–6

Distance (m)

Nuclear Physics

Full System

Atomic Physics

Molecular Level

Turbulence

Continuum Models

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ASCI

Purple

ASCI

Purple

Blue Gene/L

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Blue Gene/L differs from current leading edge simulation platforms in some important areas

Blue Gene/L

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Important points about Blue Gene/L

z Embedded technology promises to be an efficient path toward building massively parallel computers optimized at the system level

z Cost / performance is ~ 20 to 50 times better than standard methods to get to teraflops

z Low Power is critical to achieving a dense, simple, inexpensive packaging solution

z Blue Gene/L will have a scientific reach far beyond existing limits for a large class of important scientific problems

z Blue Gene/L will give insight into possible future product directions

z Blue Gene/L hardware will be flexible

z A mature, sophisticated software environment needs to be developed to really determine the reach (both scientific and commercial) of this architecture

Blue Gene/L