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Running Jobs on the Argonne BG/L System (BGL)

Access to BGL compute nodes is provided via the cqsub command.
cqsub -t <time> -n <nodecount> -c <#processors> -m <mode>  <exe> [arg1,arg2,...]

Where:

<time>  is in minutes (required)

<nodecount> is the number of nodes to use (required)

<#processors> use this if the number of nodes != number of procs
    (optional, default is <nodecount>)

<mode> is one of 'co' or 'vn'   (optional, default is 'co')

<exe> is the full path name to the mpi executable

[arg1,arg2,...] are any arguments to the mpi executable

The partition will be automatically selected from the available ones.

To check the queue:

cqstat

The Argonne BlueGene/L system (BG/L) has 1024 compute nodes that are divided into partitions of the following sizes (the partition size it the number of compute nodes, the number of processors is double that because each compute node has two processors). Please note that when you use a partition size smaller than 512, your code cannot use the full Torus network. Accessing the Torus requires the midplanes links (only accessible from 512 node and larger partitions) because the torus is formed by interleaving midplanes to avoid the long cabling required at the end of a long succession of midplanes. Not using the Torus network will most likely cause the performance to be very poor. In addition, 64-node and 256-node partitions have sub-optimal tree network topologies, so file I/O performance may suffer to some degree on these partition sizes.

Desired Usage Partition Size # of processors
Development, Scaling 32 64
Development, Scaling 64 128
Development, Scaling 128 256
Development, Scaling 256 512
No Development 512 1024
No Development 1024 2048


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