Blue Gene Extreme Scaling Workshop 2011

From 14 to 16 February 2011, JSC organized its 2011 Blue Gene Extreme Scaling Workshop. Similar to the previous workshops in 2009 and 2010, the main focus was on application codes that could be scaled up during the workshop to the full Blue Gene/P system JUGENE, which consists of 72 racks with a total of 294,912 cores – the highest number of cores available worldwide in a single system since 2009.

Interested application teams had to submit short proposals, which were evaluated. Selection criteria were the required extreme scaling, the application-related constraints which had to be fulfilled by the JUGENE software infrastructure, and the scientific impact that the codes could produce. The process was very competitive: 8 out of the submitted 15 high-quality proposals were selected. Participating teams came from the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in the US, the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, the Mickiewicz University in Poland, University College London in the UK, Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea in Spain, RZG MPI and the University of Heidelberg.

During the workshop, the teams were supported by JSC parallel application experts, the JUGENE system administrators and two IBM MPI and compiler experts. In addition, the participants shared their expertise and knowledge. The workshop was extremely successful: each of the 8 teams succeeded in submitting one or more successful full 72-rack jobs for 11(!) different applications during the course of the workshop as some teams experimented with more than one code.

All experience gathered during the workshop will be summarized in a technical report. For more information on the workshop and the reports of the previous workshops see http://www2.fz-juelich.de/jsc/bg-ws11

(Contact: Dr. Bernd Mohr)

from JSC News No. 193, March 2011