Measuring power consumption on IBM Blue Gene/P

Energy efficiency is a key design principle of the IBM Blue Gene series of supercomputers, and Blue Gene systems have consistently gained top GFlops/Watt rankings on the Green500 list. The Blue Gene hardware and management software provide built-in features to monitor power consumption at all levels of the machine’s power distribution network. This paper presents the Blue Gene/P power measurement infrastructure and discusses the operational aspects of using this infrastructure on Petascale machines. We also describe the integration of Blue Gene power monitoring capabilities into system-level tools like LLview , and highlight some results of analyzing the production workload at Research Center Jülich (FZJ).