24th to 26th June 2019
We are pleased to announce we will shortly be holding a 3-day DiRAC-Intel Optane Hackathon at Durham University. . The event will provide the DiRAC community with the opportunity to explore the potential for Intel’s new Optane memory to support their science.
The Event
Intel have generously agreed to sponsor the 3-day Optane hackathon. Learn how Intel® Optane™ memory and intelligent system acceleration work to deliver higher performance.
Intel’s Optane memory technology (a.k.a. Apache Pass, a.k.a. 3-D memory) offers the potential to incorporate increased memory volumes within nodes, with performance inbetween that of regular DRAM and flash storage. As part of our on-going preparations for DiRAC-3, we are interested in exploring how this technology may benefit DiRAC codes and workflows. We are therefore inviting users whose workflows might benefit from such hardware to attend this workshop. In addition to finding out whether Optane memory will benefit your code (and potentially giving you additional lead time to prepare to exploit it in DiRAC-3 systems), the workshop will explore ways to improve the memory usage of your code on the current DiRAC systems.
Over the three days, we hope that several major DiRAC science codes will be ported and that the teams who attend will gain the skills to assist other DiRAC researchers to port additional codes in the future.
Research
This event will provide the DiRAC community with the opportunity to explore the potential for Intel’s new Optane memory in supporting PPAN science. There will be good opportunity to discuss the impact of this new technology with colleagues from different research areas in a relaxed, welcoming, and fun environment, where new ideas challenge old dogmas.
Who can apply
No prior experience of Optane memory programming is required – there will be material available in advance of the hackathon itself to provide an introduction. Teams of 2-3 people can apply with 1 or 2 codes to be worked on. It’s important that all those who attend are familiar with the code that their team will be working on.
The event is free to attend and accommodation costs will be supplemented by DiRAC. You only have to get to Durham and we will do the rest. We would appreciate it if your team is limited to a maximum of three participants.
This is part of our on-going work to ensure that DiRAC provides the most appropriate hardware for your science and the hackathon will help provide input to discussions on the design of future DiRAC systems.