Enabling dual-core mode in BlueGene/L: challenges and solutions
Almasi, G.; Bachega, L.R.; Siddhartha Chatterjee; Manish Gupta; Lieber, D.; Martorell, X.; Moreira, J.E.
Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing, 2003. Proceedings. 15th Symposium on
Volume , Issue , 10-12 Nov. 2003 Page(s): 19 - 26
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/CAHPC.2003.1250317
Summary: BlueGene/L is a massively parallel computer system with 65536 dual-processor compute nodes. The peak performance of BlueGene/L is in excess of 360 TFLOP/s if both processor cores in a node are used for computation. The main challenge of deploying this dual-core mode of operation is that the L1 caches in each core are not hardware coherent. This forces a software-based approach to cache coherence and guides our design of a programming model for dual-core mode. We describe the design, implementation, and performance evaluation of system software for enabling the use of dual-core mode on BlueGene/L. Our preliminary performance results show that our approach to dual-core mode is effective for key numerical kernels.
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