BlueGene/P (BG/P) is the second generation BlueGene architecture from IBM, succeeding BlueGene/L (BG/L). BG/P is a system-on-a-chip (SoC) design that uses four PowerPC 450 cores operating at 850 MHz with a double precision, dual pipe floating point unit per core. These chips are connected with multiple interconnection networks including a 3-D torus, a global collective network, and a global barrier network. The design is intended to provide a highly scalable, physically dense system with relatively low power requirements per flop. In this paper, we report on our examination of BG/P, presented in the context of a set of important scientific applications, and as compared to other major large scale supercomputers in use today. Our investigation confirms that BG/P has good scalability with an expected lower performance per processor when compared to the Cray XT4's Opteron. We also find that BG/P uses very low power per floating point operation for certain kernels, yet it has less of a power advantage when considering science driven metrics for mission applications.
['Sadaf R. Alam', 'Richard Frederick Barrett', 'Michael H Bast', 'Mark R. Fahey', 'Jeffery A Kuehn', 'Collin B McCurdy', 'James H. Rogers', 'Philip C. Roth', 'Ramanan Sankaran', 'Jeffrey S. Vetter', 'Patrick H. Worley', 'Weikuan Yu']
Early evaluation of IBM BlueGene/P