Blue Gene/L programming and operating environment

programming and operating environment J. E. Moreira G. Almási C. Archer R. Bellofatto P. Bergner J. R. Brunheroto M. Brutman J. G. Castaños P. G. Crumley M. Gupta T. Inglett D. Lieber D. Limpert P. McCarthy M. Megerian M. Mendell M. Mundy D. Reed R. K. Sahoo A. Sanomiya R. Shok B. Smith G. G. Stewart With up to 65,536 compute nodes and a peak performance of more than 360 teraflops, the Blue Genet/L (BG/L) supercomputer represents a new level of massively parallel systems. The system software stack for BG/L creates a programming and operating environment that harnesses the raw power of this architecture with great effectiveness. The design and implementation of this environment followed three major principles: simplicity, performance, and familiarity. By specializing the services provided by each component of the system architecture, we were able to keep each one simple and leverage the BG/L hardware features to deliver high performance to applications. We also implemented standard programming interfaces and programming languages that greatly simplified the job of porting applications to BG/L. The effectiveness of our approach has been demonstrated by the operational success of several prototype and production machines, which have already been scaled to 16,384 nodes.