, IBM announced the start of a five-year effort to build a massively parallel computer, to be applied to the study of biomolecular phenomena such as protein folding. The project has two main goals: to advance our understanding of the mechanisms behind protein folding via large-scale simulation, and to explore novel ideas in massively parallel machine architecture and software. This project should enable biomolecular simulations that are orders of magnitude larger than current technology permits. Major areas of investigation include: how to most effectively utilize this novel platform to meet our scientific goals, how to make such massively parallel machines more usable, and how to achieve performance targets, with reasonable cost, through novel machine architectures. This paper provides an overview of the Blue Gene project at IBM Research. It includes some of the plans that have been made, the intended goals, and the anticipated challenges regarding the scientific work, the software application, and the hardware design.

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SUMMARYIn this paper, we depart from our previously proposed Non-Congestive Queuing (NCQ) mechanism and propose a new scheduling discipline that allows for efficient interoperation of dedicated systems (such as sensor and voice networks) with the Internet. More precisely, our approach provides delay guarantees to applications that do not contribute noticeably to congestion because of their tiny packet sizes and low transmission rates. In addition, our approach uses a second level of prioritization that conditionally favors, in terms of delay, applications with slightly longer packets as well. Based on the NCQ concept, NonCongestive Queuing Plus (NCQ+) promotes applications that require comparatively small service times, as long as their total service times cause insignificant delays to other packets in the queue. Therefore, we prioritize packets, and in turn corresponding flows, according to their impact on total delay. We evaluate NCQ+ using ns-2-based experiments. Results show that whenever prioritization buffer resources are sufficient, NCQ+ can provide non-detectable delays to sensor applications and conditionally improve the performance of VoIP applications, while maintaining the impact on the performance of the other flows insignificant.

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