Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), Pennsylvania’s only National Science Foundation high-performance computing facility, and Numascale, whose products support the construction of low-cost, scalable-server computer systems, are collaborating to investigate the applicability of Numascale systems to research projects requiring more directly addressable memory than is readily available on single, commodity, multi-socket, large-memory servers.
'Rapid advancement in many scientific fields of data-dependent research will be facilitated by the availability of larger memory systems at near commodity prices,' said Michael Levine, scientific director at PSC. 'Having large amounts of data in directly-addressable memory avoids very time-consuming disk input/output and allows a much more productive programming paradigm.'
The field of supercomputing is well known for engineering extreme processing speeds but increasingly, researchers’ calculations are limited not by the speed of processing but access to and efficient use of vast amounts of data. Application areas that require very large memories include natural language processing, multi-organism genomics and quantum chemistry.
'We see the collaboration with Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center as an important milestone for utilising NumaConnect for a number of applications that have previously been limited by inferior memory capacity in standard servers,' said Einar Rustad, CTO and co-founder of Numascale.
'The huge and scalable memory capacity in systems with NumaConnect allows users to operate in the familiar programming and runtime environment they are used to with workstations.'