BGQ

Blue Gene/Q (BGQ)
Installed	August 2012
Operating System	RH6.3, CNK (Linux)
Number of Nodes	2048(32,768 cores), 512 (8,192 cores)
Interconnect	5D Torus (jobs), QDR Infiniband (I/O)
Ram/Node	16 Gb
Cores/Node	16 (64 threads)
Login/Devel Node	bgq01,bgq02
Vendor Compilers	bgxlc, bgxlf
Queue Submission	Loadleveler

Specifications

BGQ is an extremely powerful and energy efficient 3rd generation IBM Supercomputer built around a system on a chip compute node that has a 16core 1.6GHz Power based CPU and 16Gb of Ram and runs a very lightweight Linux OS called CNK. The nodes are bundled in groups of 32 and then 16 of these groups make up a midplane with 2 midplanes per rack. The compute nodes are all connected togther using a custom 5D interconnect. Each midplane has 8 Power7 I/O nodes that run a full Redhat Linux OS that manages the compute nodes and mounts the GPFS filesystem.

Jobs

BGQ job size is typically determined by midplanes (512 nodes or 8192 cores), however sub-blocks can be used to further subdivide midplanes with a minimum of one IO node per block. In SciNet's configuration (with 8 I/O nodes per midplane) this allows 64 nodes (1024 cores) to be the smallest job size.

I/O

GPFS

Documentation

[ http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/SG247869/wwhelp/wwhimpl/js/html/wwhelp.htm BGQ System Administration ] [ http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/SG247948/wwhelp/wwhimpl/js/html/wwhelp.htm BGQ Application Developemnt ]