Enabling dual-core mode in BlueGene/L: challenges and solutions

Author

Almási, George ; Bachega, Leonardo R. ; Chatterjee, Siddhartha ; Gupta, Manish ; Lieber, Derek ; Martorell, Xavier ; Moreira, José E.

Author_Institution

IBM Thomas J. Watson Res. Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA

fYear

2003

fDate

10-12 Nov. 2003

Firstpage

19

Lastpage

26

Abstract

BlueGene/L is a massively parallel computer system with 65536 dual-processor compute nodes. The peak performance of BlueGene/L is in excess of 360 TFLOP/s if both processor cores in a node are used for computation. The main challenge of deploying this dual-core mode of operation is that the L1 caches in each core are not hardware coherent. This forces a software-based approach to cache coherence and guides our design of a programming model for dual-core mode. We describe the design, implementation, and performance evaluation of system software for enabling the use of dual-core mode on BlueGene/L. Our preliminary performance results show that our approach to dual-core mode is effective for key numerical kernels.

Keywords

cache storage; coprocessors; parallel machines; parallel programming; performance evaluation; 360 TFLOPS; BlueGene/L computer system; cache coherence model; dual processor mode; key numerical kernel; software based approach; system software; Coherence; Collaboration; Concurrent computing; Engines; Hardware; High performance computing; Kernel; Laboratories; Random access memory; System software;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing, 2003. Proceedings. 15th Symposium on

Print_ISBN

0-7695-2046-4

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/CAHPC.2003.1250317

Filename

1250317