Early experiences with scientific applications on the IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer

Sadaf R. Alam, Constantine Bekas, Hans Boettiger, Alessandro Curioni, Gilles Fourestey, Willi Homberg, Michael Knobloch, Teodoro Laino, Thilo Maurer, Bernd Mohr, Dirk Pleiter, Arwed Schiller, Thomas C. Schulthess, Valéry Weber

Abstract: We report early experiences with porting highly complex scientific applications to the IBM Blue Gene®/Q platform. In addition, we report our progress in porting performance analysis tools that are deemed to be key in helping users understand massively parallel, massively threaded applications. Porting proved to be quite a smooth process. Although in this early study we did not use the full array of the novel architectural features, we nevertheless obtained quite satisfactory, though preliminary, performance results. Thus, we can safely anticipate impressive further improvements in overall performance once the full capability of the Blue Gene/Q architecture is exploited.