Workload Analysis of Blue Waters

TL;DR

This paper presents a detailed workload analysis of the Blue Waters supercomputer to inform performance optimization and guide future architectural design for handling complex scientific problems.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive characterization of Blue Waters' workload, highlighting its computational demands and informing system and architectural improvements.

Findings

Workload is highly diverse across scientific domains.

Memory, IO, and communication are critical bottlenecks.

Results guide future system and architecture design.

Abstract

Blue Waters is a Petascale-level supercomputer whose mission is to enable the national scientific and research community to solve "grand challenge" problems that are orders of magnitude more complex than can be carried out on other high performance computing systems. Given the important and unique role that Blue Waters plays in the U.S. research portfolio, it is important to have a detailed understanding of its workload in order to guide performance optimization both at the software and system configuration level as well as inform architectural balance tradeoffs. Furthermore, understanding the computing requirements of the Blue Water's workload (memory access, IO, communication, etc.), which is comprised of some of the most computationally demanding scientific problems, will help drive changes in future computing architectures, especially at the leading edge. With this objective in mind, the project team carried out a detailed workload analysis of Blue Waters.