Title: Workload Analysis of Blue Waters,
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.