The Unified Communication Framework (UCF), in collaboration with Arm, announced an open source contribution of an OpenSHMEM-based I/O research extension to access persistent memory storage.
The contributed software enables Smart Networking Adapters to provide real-time access to large datasets and deliver higher application performance for latency-sensitive applications such as fraud detection, cybersecurity analysis, web-scale personalization, and Internet of Things (IoT).
UCF is a collaborative effort by industry, laboratories, and academia to create production-grade communication frameworks and open standards for data-centric and high-performance applications.
“We’ve seen the efficiency gains achieved by offloading network processing to smart adapters, but now we’re experiencing the incredible flexibility and performance available for other offload activities, such as persistent memory storage,” said Brent Gorda, senior director of HPC, Infrastructure Line of Business, Arm. “As an active open source contributor, Arm is pleased to provide to the UCF’s OpenSNAPI project this I/O extension to fuel the next wave of distributed computing applications.”
OpenSNAPI is a collaboration between industry, laboratories and academia with the goal to create a standard application programming interface (API) for accessing the compute engines on the network, and specifically on the smart network adapter. OpenSNAPI allows application developers to leverage the network compute cores in parallel to the host compute cores for accelerating application runtime, and to perform operations and processing closer to the data.
“The UCF’s OpenSNAPI project is helping to expand the applicability and portability of emerging use-cases for smart networking and computational storage to enhance supercomputing performance, offload security or virtualization functions, increase storage performance, and more,” said Steve Poole, UCF board and founding member. “Through open source collaboration with Arm and EMC3 at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the UCF’s OpenSNAPI project is successfully showcasing the flexibility, performance and value of a new class of processing power available in the network.”
