Blog

After four years of hard work, the NEXTGenIO project has now come to an end. It has been an extremely enjoyable and successful collaboration with a dedicated group of HPC users, software and tools developers, and hardware providers from across Europe.

14 November, Bayes Centre, Edinburgh

Here at EPCC we are gearing up for the HPC-Europa3 workshop for SMEs. This event will explain the funding available to support visits by EU experts in high performance computing to Scottish/UK SMEs (and vice versa), and also for access to major computing resources for large-scale simulations and/or data analytics.

Targeted Performance

Blog post updated 8th November 2019 to add Figure 6 highlighting PMDK vs fsdax performance for a range of node counts.

Following on from the recent blog post on our initial performance experiences when using byte-addressable persistent memory (B-APM) in the form of Intel's Optane DCPMM memory modules for data storage and access within compute nodes, we have been exploring performance and programming such memory beyond simple filesystem functionality.

For our previous performance results we used what is known as a fsdax (Filesystem Direct Access) filesystem, which enables bypassing the operating system (O/S) page cache and associated extra memory copies for I/O operations. We were using an ext4 filesystem on fsdax, although ext2 and xfs filesystems are also supported.

Over the last three decades the collections of libraries, archives and museums have been transformed by large-scale digitisation. The volume and quality of available digitised text now makes searching and linking these data feasible, where previous attempts were restricted due to limited data availability, quality, and lack of shared infrastructures. One example of this is the extensive digital collection offered by the National Library of Scotland (NLS) (see Figure 1) [1], which can be accessed online and also downloaded for further digital humanities research.