Thursday, October 8, 2009
The IBM Blue Gene series of energy-efficient supercomputers,
central to breakthrough scientific research around the world, were singled out
by President Barack Obama as a Medal of Technology and Innovation award-winner
on October 7 in Washington,
D.C.
When IBM accepts this well-deserved honor, computer
scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne
and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories can take pride in their role in
making these computers a reality. Both sites contributed critical input and
software components through a DOE research and development partnership with IBM
that strongly impacted Blue Gene’s extreme-scale design.
“The success of this partnership is an excellent example of
how national laboratories can help fuel industry and drive innovation ,” said
William Brinkman, Director of DOE’s Office of Science.
“The Blue Gene supercomputers are an outstanding example of
our investment in nuclear security providing the tools to tackle broader
national challenges,” said NNSA Administrator Thomas D’Agostino. “This machine,
which was originally developed to ensure the safety and reliability of our
nuclear stockpile without testing, has led to amazing advances in science and
discovery. I congratulate IBM, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and
Argonne National Laboratory for a job well done.”
DOE, which leads the world in providing supercomputers for
scientific research, began an R&D partnership with IBM in 2001 to develop
the Blue Gene platform. Argonne, together with
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), worked on key aspects of the
design and provided critical software components to ensure it was well suited
to solve challenges in energy, the environment and national security.
“Blue Gene balances energy efficiencies with a major
breakthrough in scalability, which is imperative to attack problems in science
and engineering at unprecedented scale and speed,” said Pete Beckman, director
of Argonne’s Leadership Computing Facility,
home to the first large Blue Gene/P.
The Blue Gene leverages a high-performance, low-power,
system-on-a-chip architecture offering extreme integration that dramatically
improves reliability increases energy efficiency and reduces operating costs.
“The Blue Gene architecture has greatly enhanced the
National Nuclear Security Administration’s capability for predictive simulation
and uncertainty quantification,” said Mark Seager, Asst. Dept. Head for
Advanced Computing Technology at LLNL.
Much of the software needed to operate Blue Gene comes from
the open source community and was developed by laboratories and universities
around the world. Argonne was actively
involved in fostering that community as well as developing key components of
the system software. For example, the Blue Gene leverages Argonne's
MPICH, the version of the Message Passing Interface that scientists use to
write parallel programs capable of scaling to hundreds of thousands of CPU
cores. Computer scientists are also working on extending the capabilities of
Blue Gene with advanced math libraries, improved parallel file systems, and
even experimental operating systems such as ZeptoOS, which permits users to run
Linux on the Blue Gene’s compute nodes.
Another critical aspect of the Blue Gene’s success was
ensuring the platform was adopted by the high-performance computing community.
In 2004, Argonne and IBM jointly created the
Blue Gene Consortium, an international group of laboratory, university and
industrial researchers collaborating to evaluate the technology and platform
and provide critical feedback for future Blue Gene designs.
The Medal of Technology and Innovation is described as the
highest honor for technological achievement for outstanding contributions
related to the nation’s competiveness, standard of living and quality of life
through the development and commercialization of technological products. Obama
will present the medal to IBM, as well as four inventors who were also
recognized for the award, at a White House ceremony on October 7. The medal
program is administered by the United States Patent and Trademark Office and is
awarded annually to individuals, teams and companies.
“It is an honor and a privilege to be part of this
partnership,” said Beckman. “The Blue Gene/P is already making a measurable
impact on the research community and enabling advancements that will shape our
future”.
IBM
Research Blue Gene page
SOURCE: Argonne