Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Numascale AS to Collaborate on Improved Memory Systems for Research
June 28, 2013
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), Pennsylvania’s only National Science Foundation high performance computing facility, and Numascale AS, whose products support the construction of low-cost, scalable-server computer systems, have launched a collaborative project investigating the applicability of Numascale systems to the many 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,” says Michael J. Levine, scientific director, 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 utilizing NumaConnectTM for a number of applications that have previously been limited by inferior memory capacity in standard servers,” says 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.”
This, Rustad explains, eliminates the need for explicit message passing and significantly reduces the overall time from idea to solution for a number of important applications in many scientific fields. “PSC’s unique expertise will strengthen our focus on applications that are key to advances in major scientific fields and help us to widen the market for Numascale.”
The collaboration between PSC and Numascale seeks to leverage PSC’s unique and extensive experience with very large memory computing systems and Numascale’s NumaConnect memory technology to produce systems capable of handling such large data volumes without memory-retrieval lags. NumaConnect uses commodity servers as building blocks to provide memory capacities and retrieval speeds currently only available through high-end and enterprise-class systems. PSC’s application specialists will work with Numascale engineers and application programmers to find ways the two organizations’ experience and expertise can be combined synergistically.