SYSTEMS

IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputers are deployed by universities and government research labs worldwide for computational studies in areas such as weapons research, radio astronomy, protein folding, climate research, cosmology, and drug development. In the June 2009 listing, three Blue Gene/P sites were in the top 10 of the Top500 Supercomputer Sites list, including a new system at Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ) in Germany, which placed number three on the list.

The IMSL Fortran Library offers MPI coverage, integrated ScaLAPACK support, as well as the ability to leverage IBM’s ESSL and OpenMP to support both shared memory (SMP) and distributed memory (DMP) technology for developing high performance computing applications. The library can also automatically execute certain algorithms on the appropriate environment, SMP or DMP, depending on the number of nodes chosen.

With support for Blue Gene/P, IMSL Fortran Library coverage now ranges from personal computers to the world’s largest supercomputers. Developers can write prototype or application code on desktops and use that same code on Blue Gene/P, providing great flexibility in numerical application development without sacrificing capability or performance. The IMSL Fortran Library is also backwards compatible, enabling the migration of legacy applications from other high performance computing environments to Blue Gene/P. With an increasing number of labs and organizations moving to Blue Gene/P to run their numerically intense applications, having reliable numerical analysis software like the IMSL Fortan Library is critical.

“The early benchmark results are very positive. The Blue Gene/P architecture shows excellent scaling for large problems using the IMSL Fortran Library,” said Sean FitzGerald, vice president engineering/CTO, Visual Numerics (now part of Rogue Wave Software). “With the IMSL Fortran Library on Blue Gene/P, developers will have the industry’s most comprehensive high performance numerical analysis solution.”

 “Visual Numerics complete support of the Blue Gene/P technology with the latest version of the IMSL Fortran Library is a excellent option for clients,” said David Turek, vice president, IBM Deep Computing.  “The availability of the IMSL Fortran Library provides our Blue Gene customers with an extensive and reliable set of mathematical and statistical functions to help meet their high performance computing application development requirements.”