ABSTRACT
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, National Center for Supercomputing Applications
3.1 The Blue Waters Computational and Analysis Subsystems . . . . . 18 3.2 Blue Waters On-line Storage Subsystem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
3.2.1 On-line Storage Performance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 3.3 Blue Waters Near-line Storage Subsystem and External Server
Subsystem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 3.4 Blue Waters Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
3.4.1 Science and Engineering Team Application I/O Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
3.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Blue Waters, a joint project funded by the National Science Foundation Advanced CyberInfrastructure Division, the State of Illinois, and the University of Illinois, is an exceptionally well balanced, sustained petascale system dedicated to solving a diverse range of unique science and engineering challenges that require huge amounts of sustained computational and data analysis performance. The Blue Waters system was the highest performing and largest storage system at the time of its installation and will likely be for some time after. Blue Waters has 1.66 PB of aggregate memory, which is more than any other known system to date. The challenging investigations for Blue Waters require not just billions of core hours of computational time but extreme amounts of storage and I/O performance as well. Approximately 70 science and engineering teams (SETs) are using Blue Waters at the time of this writing with about 30 “major teams” that have allocations ranging from 30 million to almost 5 billion AMD integer core hours. The SETs cross many disciplines including astrophysics, chemistry, climate, computational bio-medicine, computational biology, cosmology, engineering optimization of very large systems, fluid dynamics, molecular dynamics, physics, solar storms, seismology and
and weather.1 The Blue Waters system consists of six primary subsystems the Cray XE6/XK7 computation and analysis
subsystem, external server complex, the Cray Sonexion TM
on-line storage, the HPSS near-line storage, wide-area networking, and cyber-protection subsystems. Four of the six subsystems are discussed below.
