Panel: BlueGene/LThe Next 100 weeks

BlueGene/L Workshop

Watson, 6-Feb-04

IBM Life Sciences – WW Acad-Govt

Robert A. Eades

Large scale basic bioscience problems, e.g., protein folding (see Bob Germain’s talk)

Systems Biology (or Integrative Biology) – multiscale models and simultations going from the molecular to cellular to tissue to organ to the whole organism.

In the long term, the opportunity for personalized medicine will need to build on predictive biosimulation which includes where and how diseases, toxins, etc. and their therapies effect the organism.

Blue Gene for Life Sciences

100’s of 5-10 rack BG’s will have a much larger scientific and business impact than a dozen 60 rack BG’s

Put together readily understandable comparisons of key metrics (flops, memory, floor space, power, cooling, etc.) of BG/L (by single rack, etc.) to competitor systems.

Package a small Linux system with BG simulator, tools, and environment and sell it.

BG Summer School at locations in US, Europe, and AP that are open to customer/vendors with applications to port and optimize.

Science application developers typically build on DOE/NSF community toolsets/libraries – be sure these toolsets/libraries are ported to BG and work well.

Broaden the market and demand for BG/L

1.2

14

80.035

0.5

memoryM/F

diskM/F

memoryB/FdiskB/F

netB/F

B

B

B

B

B J

J

J

IBM (MSCF)

IBM (QCD)

Kiviat diagram of the capacities (memoryB/F and diskM/F) and bandwidths (memoryB/F, diskB/F, and networkB/F) ratios for a computer optimally configured for molecular electronic structure calculations (MSCF) and one configured for lattice gauge QCD calculations (QCD). M refers to memory/storage capacity in bytes, B the bandwidth in bytes/sec, and F the speed of the processor in flop/sec.

Use Kiviat diagrams to show how BG/L compares to competitor’s systems for key applications, algorithms, and kernels. Show not only peaks, but also actual utilization for the metrics.

Announce the follow-on architecture (SC’04?) And solicit interested parties to engage on the R&D

BG/L - #73 on the Nov ’03 Top500 List

Why can’t BG have every position on the Top500 List in 2006? An 8 Rack BG/L is > the Earth Simulator (in peak TF) So we only need 4k to 5k racks

Raise the Bar