To help researchers take advantage of Blacklight, the largest shared-memory system in the world, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) has launched a Memory Advantage Program.
Shared memory” means that a system’s memory can be directly accessed from all of its processors, as opposed to “distributed memory” (in which each processor’s memory is directly accessed only by that processor). Being a very large shared-memory system, Blacklight enables many memory-intensive research projects that can’t be easily deployed on distributed-memory supercomputers. These include convenient and rapid expression of algorithms — such as graph-theoretical ones, for which distributed memory implementations are difficult, and interactive analysis of large data sets, which can be loaded in their entirety into random-access memory.
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