This talk gives an overview of the BlueGene/L Supercomputer and describes, in detail, BlueGene/L's primary interconnection network. BlueGene/L is a jointly funded research partnership between IBM and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as part of the United States Department of Energy ASCI Advanced Architecture Research Program. This massively parallel system of 65,536 nodes is based on a new architecture that exploits system-on-a-chip technology to deliver target peak processing power of 360 teraFLOPS (trillion floating- point operations per second). The machine is scheduled to be operational in the 2004-2005 time frame, at price/performance and power consumption/performance targets unobtainable with conventional architectures.

This work represents a collaboration with numerous indivduals. For more information on BlueGene/L, see http://www.research.ibm.com/bluegene.


Philip Heidelberger received a B.A. in mathematics from Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, in 1974 and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from Stanford University, Stanford, California, in 1978. He has been a Research Staff Member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York since 1978. His research interests include modeling and analysis of computer performance, probabilistic aspects of discrete event simulations, parallel simulation, and parallel computer architectures. He has authored over 90 papers in these areas. He has won Best Paper Awards at the ACM SIGMETRICS and ACM PADS (Parallel and Distributed Simulation) Conferences and was twice awarded the INFORMS College on Simulation's Outstanding Publication Award. Dr. Heidelberger has served as Editor-in-Chief of the ACM's Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation, and was the General Chairman of the ACM SIGMETRICS/Performance 2001 Conference, the Program Co-Chairman of the ACM SIGMETRICS/Performance '92 Conference and the Program Chairman of the 1989 Winter Simulation Conference. He is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE.