IBM Blue Gene/Q system software stack
Kyung Dong Ryu, Todd A. Inglett, Ralph Bellofatto, Michael A Blocksome, Thomas M. Gooding, Sameer Kumar, Amith R. Mamidala, Mark Megerian, Steven Miller, M. T. Nelson, Bryan S. Rosenburg, Brian E. Smith, J. Van Oosten, A. Wang, Robert W. Wisniewski · IBM Journal of Research and Development · 2013
The principal focus areas for system software on the IBM Blue Gene®/Q include ultrascalability and high reliability while delivering the full performance capability of the hardware to applications. The Blue Gene/Q system software has achieved these goals while adding functionality and flexibility compared with previous versions of Blue Gene®. Whereas part of the software stack was improved with innovative evolutionary progress, such as unified sub-block partitioning and the ability to overcommit hardware threads, other areas, such as transactional memory and speculative execution, represent a revolutionary step forward. In this paper, we describe the overall software architecture of Blue Gene/Q. We then describe each of the main components of the software stack. In each area, we focus on the major enhancements introduced in the Blue Gene/Q system software stack.