Project Kittyhawk: building a global-scale computer: Blue Gene/P as a generic computing platform

This paper describes Project Kittyhawk, an undertaking at IBM Research to explore the construction of a nextgeneration platform capable of hosting many simultaneous web-scale workloads. We hypothesize that for a large class of web-scale workloads the Blue Gene/P platform is an order of magnitude more efficient to purchase and operate than the commodity clusters in use today. Driven by scientific computing demands the Blue Gene designers pursued an aggressive system-on-a-chip methodology that led to a scalable platform composed of air-cooled racks. Each rack contains more than a thousand independent computers with highspeed interconnects inside and between racks. We postulate that the same demands of efficiency and density apply to web-scale platforms. This project aims to develop the system software to enable Blue Gene/P as a generic platform capable of being used by heterogeneous workloads. We describe our firmware and operating system work to provide Blue Gene/P with generic system ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: SIGOPS
• Authors: Jonathan Appavoo, Volkmar Uhlig, Amos Waterland
• Keywords: Operating Systems, SIGOPS 2008, Simultaneous Web-scale Workloads, Web-scale Workloads