LLNL, IBM Win SC20 ‘Test of Time’ for Blue Gene/L

November 23, 2020

Nov. 23, 2020 — A team of current and former Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and IBM scientists won the annual “Test of Time” award at the 2020 Supercomputing Conference on Nov. 19 for a paper outlining LLNL’s Blue Gene/L supercomputer.

Published by the Supercomputing Conference in 2002, the paper was the first peer-reviewed overview article to disclose details of Blue Gene/L, including its nodes, system packaging and software support. Funded through a partnership between IBM and LLNL as part of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) ASCI Advanced Architecture Research Program, the machine was sited at LLNL in 2004.

The first in a series of massively parallel supercomputers under IBM’s Blue Gene project to build the first petascale supercomputer, the machine was predicted to be at least 15 times faster, 15 times more power efficient and consume about 50 times less space per computation than the fastest supercomputers that existed at the time.

“The Blue Gene/L effort was born out of an urgent need to deliver more powerful but affordable computers for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) national security work and IBM’s willingness to help,” said Terri Quinn, LLNL’s deputy associate director for High Performance Computing. “This was a calculated risk by both parties that paid off. The line of Blue Gene systems, beginning with BG/L and up to the recently retired Sequoia, were marvels, and set us on the path for exascale-class applications and systems. Speaking for LLNL, we are honored this effort was recognized by the Test of Time committee.”

Targeted to deliver a peak processing power of 360 teraFLOPs, in Nov. 2004, Blue Gene/L took first place on the TOP500 list, achieving a performance in the High Performance Linpack benchmark of 70.72 teraFLOPs. It remained the fastest supercomputer in the world until June 2008, peaking at 596 teraflops after a series of expansions. Used by scientists at LLNL, Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories, the machine ran key stockpile stewardship applications for NNSA, in addition to many other challenging scientific simulations. It was also a computational science research machine for evaluating advanced computer architectures.

Running on Blue Gene/L, LLNL researchers won the 2005 Gordon Bell Prize for peak performance for a simulation of solidification in tantalum and uranium at extreme temperatures and pressure, the first scientific application to exceed 100 teraFLOPS of sustained performance. The following year, a team including LLNL scientists won the Gordon Bell Prize for a large-scale electronic structure simulation of the heavy metal molybdenum using Blue Gene/L. And in 2007, a joint LLNL/IBM team won another Gordon Bell award for a first-of-a-kind simulation of Kelvin-Helmholtz instability in molten metals on the system.

“This machine changed everything,” said LLNL physicist Fred Streitz, who led the 2005 Gordon Bell Prize team and is currently on assignment at DOE’s Artificial Intelligence and Technology Office. “The Blue Gene/L machine really set the stage for what massive parallelism could accomplish. It seems quaint now to think about people questioning whether you could use 100,000 processors, but you look at modern machines that have millions and millions of processor units and no one says, ‘oh you can’t use that,’ because you know what? We can. It was quite a remarkable time, and just an enormous amount of fun. And through all this time it stands as one of the things I’m most proud of, that we were a part of making this little bit of history.”

Announced during the SC20 Awards Ceremony, the Test of Time award recognizes a paper from a past Supercomputing Conference that has deeply influenced the HPC discipline, made a historical impact and changed HPC trends. It has been handed out every year since 2013.

“For nearly a decade the Blue Gene/L series won multiple Top500 awards and Gordon Bell Prizes, including finalists, and served as a vehicle for many research publications,” said Test of Time Award Chair Amanda Randles, a former LLNL computational scientist and current assistant professor in biomedical sciences at Duke University. “In addition, Blue Gene/L was a precursor of the importance of energy efficiency before it was a recognized problem in the community. It’s now a dominant constraint in the design of HPC architectures. This paper has had a tremendous and ongoing impact on the design of subsequent supercomputers.”

Among the paper’s co-authors was LLNL physicist Pavlos Vranas, who was at IBM at the time. Vranas worked in the core architecture group and helped design an important part of the network router.

“In the computing world, where things get old very fast, it means a lot to me that Blue Gene/L has been recognized with this award,” Vranas said. “When we were architecting and designing Blue Gene/L, I felt this was a unique machine. Not only did we have a new technology — “system-on-a-chip”— but the architecture was based on a history of machines born from the science of Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics (Lattice QCD), the theory of sub-nuclear physics that has been my field of theoretical physics research. And as is always the case with these things, the team was unique, and I feel honored to have worked with them. I remember that time very fondly.”

Other members of the team formerly from LLNL included computational physicist Lynn Kissel, ex-HPC systems lead Mark Seager, computer scientist R. Kim Yates and computer scientist Jeffrey Vetter, who is currently a corporate fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

For more on the Test of Time Award, visit the web.


Source: LLNL

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion XL — were added to the benchmark suite as MLPerf continues Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing power it brings to artificial intelligence.  Nvidia's DGX Read more…

Call for Participation in Workshop on Potential NSF CISE Quantum Initiative

March 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Next month there will be a workshop to discuss what a quantum initiative led by NSF’s Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate could entail. The details are posted below in a Ca Read more…

Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization

March 25, 2024

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum device Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at the network layer threatens to make bigger and brawnier pro Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion pa Read more…

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing po Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HB Read more…

Nvidia Looks to Accelerate GenAI Adoption with NIM

March 19, 2024

Today at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia launched a new offering aimed at helping customers quickly deploy their generative AI applications in a secure, s Read more…

The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says

March 19, 2024

We are in the early days of a transformative shift in how business gets done thanks to the advent of generative AI, according to Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Intel Won’t Have a Xeon Max Chip with New Emerald Rapids CPU

December 14, 2023

As expected, Intel officially announced its 5th generation Xeon server chips codenamed Emerald Rapids at an event in New York City, where the focus was really o Read more…

IBM Quantum Summit: Two New QPUs, Upgraded Qiskit, 10-year Roadmap and More

December 4, 2023

IBM kicks off its annual Quantum Summit today and will announce a broad range of advances including its much-anticipated 1121-qubit Condor QPU, a smaller 133-qu Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire