Ensemble dispatching on an IBM Blue Gene/L for a bioinformatics knowledge environment
Paul Marshall, Matthew Woitaszek, Henry M. Tufo, Rob Knight, Daniel T. McDonald, Julia K. Goodrich · 2009
This paper discusses our work providing support for processing a large number of short tasks within the context of our development of a collaborative bioinformatics knowledge environment for structural biologists, environmental microbiologists, and evolutionary biologists. We have designed and implemented a new ensemble-based task dispatching system that we have deployed on a Blue Gene/L system in conjunction with the Blue Gene's High Throughput Computing (HTC) capability. Unlike our prior general database-backed HTC task dispatching system, the ensemble-based task dispatching system is able to efficiently process and dispatch large numbers of very short tasks to over a thousand cores. We also investigate the scalability of the IBM Blue Gene/L at HTC in general, identifying and eliminating processor-reboot inefficincies for very short tasks for specific applications, making the Blue Gene/L a feasible processing system for this bioinformatics workload.