Blue Gene is an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the PFLOPS (petaFLOPS) range, with low power consumption.

The project created three generations of supercomputers, Blue Gene/L, Blue Gene/P, and Blue Gene/Q. Blue Gene systems have often led the TOP500[1] and Green500[2] rankings of the most powerful and most power efficient supercomputers, respectively. Blue Gene systems have also consistently scored top positions in the Graph500 list.[3] The project was awarded the 2009 National Medal of Technology and Innovation.[4]

In December 1999, IBM announced a US$100 million research initiative for a five-year effort to build a massively parallel computer, to be applied to the study of biomolecular phenomena such as protein folding.[5] The project had two main goals: to advance our understanding of the mechanisms behind protein folding via large-scale simulation, and to explore novel ideas in massively parallel machine architecture and software. Major areas of investigation included: how to use this novel platform to effectively meet its scientific goals, how to make such massively parallel machines more usable, and how to achieve performance targets at a reasonable cost, through novel machine architectures. The initial design for Blue Gene was based on an early version of the Cyclops64 architecture, designed by Monty Denneau. The initial research and development work was pursued at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.

At IBM, Alan Gara started working on an extension of the QCDOC architecture into a more general-purpose supercomputer: The 4D nearest-neighbor interconnection network was replaced by a network supporting routing of messages from any node to any other; and a parallel I/O subsystem was added. DOE started funding the development of this system and it became known as Blue Gene/L (L for Light); development of the original Blue Gene system continued under the name Blue Gene/C (C for Cyclops) and, later, Cyclops64.

In November 2004 a 16-rack system, with each rack holding 1,024 compute nodes, achieved first place in the TOP500 list, with a Linpack performance of 70.72 TFLOPS.[1] It thereby overtook NEC's Earth Simulator, which had held the title of the fastest computer in the world since 2002. From 2004 through 2007 the Blue Gene/L installation at LLNL[6] gradually expanded to 104 racks, achieving 478 TFLOPS Linpack and 596 TFLOPS peak. The LLNL BlueGene/L installation held the first position in the TOP500 list for 3.5 years, until in June 2008 it was overtaken by IBM's Cell-based Roadrunner system at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which was the first system to surpass the 1 PetaFLOPS mark. The system was built in Rochester, MN IBM plant.

While the LLNL installation was the largest Blue Gene/L installation, many smaller installations followed. In November 2006, there were 27 computers on the TOP500 list using the Blue Gene/L architecture. All these computers were listed as having an architecture of eServer Blue Gene Solution. For example, three racks of Blue Gene/L were housed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

While the TOP500 measures performance on a single benchmark application, Linpack, Blue Gene/L also set records for performance on a wider set of applications. Blue Gene/L was the first supercomputer ever to run over 100 TFLOPS sustained on a real world application, namely a three-dimensional molecular dynamics code (ddcMD), simulating solidification (nucleation and growth processes) of molten metal under high pressure and temperature conditions. This achievement won the 2005 Gordon Bell Prize.

In June 2006, NNSA and IBM announced that Blue Gene/L achieved 207.3 TFLOPS on a quantum chemical application (Qbox).[7] At Supercomputing 2006,[8] Blue Gene/L was awarded the winning prize in all HPC Challenge Classes of awards.[9] In 2007, a team from the IBM Almaden Research Center and the University of Nevada ran an artificial neural network almost half as complex as the brain of a mouse for the equivalent of a second (the network was run at 1/10 of normal speed for 10 seconds).[10]

The Blue Gene/L supercomputer was unique in the following aspects:[11]

The Blue Gene/L architecture was an evolution of the QCDSP and QCDOC architectures. Each Blue Gene/L Compute or I/O node was a single ASIC with associated DRAM memory chips. The ASIC integrated two 700MHz PowerPC 440 embedded processors, each with a double-pipeline-double-precision Floating Point Unit (FPU), a cache sub-system with built-in DRAM controller and the logic to support multiple communication sub-systems. The dual FPUs gave each Blue Gene/L node a theoretical peak performance of 5.6 GFLOPS (gigaFLOPS). The two CPUs were not cache coherent with one another.

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