Blue Gene/L is curently the world’s fastest and most scalable supercomputer. It has demonstrated esentialy linear scaling al the way to 131,072 procesors in several benchmarks and real aplications. The operating systems for the compute I/O nodes of Blue Gene/L are among components responsible for that scalability. Compute nodes are dedicated to runing aplication proceses, whereas I/O nodes are dedicated to performing system functions. The operating systems adopted for each of these nodes reflecthis separation ofunction. Compute nodes run a lightweight operating system caled the compute node kernel. I/O nodes run a port of the Linux operating system. This paper discuses the architecture and design of thisolution for Blue Gene/L in context of the hardware characteristics that led to the design decisions. It also explains and demonstrates how those decisions are instrumental in achieving the performance and scalability for which Blue Gene/L is famous.
By: José Moreira, Michael Brutman, José Castaños, Thomas Engelsiepen, Mark Giampapa, Tom Gooding, Roger Haskin, Todd Inglett, Derek Lieber, Pat McCarthy, Mike Mundy, Jeff Parker, Brian Wallenfeld
Published in: RC24037 in 2006
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