Measuring Power Consumption on IBM Blue Gene/Q

Abstract—In addition to pushing what is possible computa-tionally, state-of-the-art supercomputers are also pushing what is acceptable in terms of power consumption. Despite hardware manufacturers researching and developing efficient system com-ponents (e.g., processor, memory, etc.), the power consumption of a complete system remains an understudied research area. Because of the complexity and unpredictable workloads of these systems, estimating the power consumption of a full system is a nontrivial task. In this paper, we provide system-level power usage and tem-perature analysis of early access to Argonne’s latest generation of IBM Blue Gene supercomputers, the Mira Blue Gene/Q system. The analysis is provided from the point of view of jobs running on the system. We describe the important implications these system level measurements have as well as the challenges they present. Using profiling code on benchmarks, we will also look at the new tools this latest generation of supercomputer provides and gauge their usefulness and how well they match up against the environmental data. I