System Research
Research conducted on the Delta and DeltaAI machines covers a wide array of domains and cross-disciplinary projects. With both Delta and DeltaAI, you’ll find the advancements in our architecture design and state-of-the-art hardware and software will help take your research to new heights.
GPU Computing
Delta and DeltaAI have been designed from the ground up as GPU-based accelerated computing machines. The Delta Complex teams continue to survey the research community for research projects and domains that could benefit from optimizations and/or application porting for GPU-accelerated computing.
Data: Moving Beyond POSIx
Strict adherence to POSIX semantics is challenging (and unnecessary for most applications) in parallel systems. Delta is a pioneer in reducing the reliance on POSIX file systems to help improve system uptime and performance. The Delta team has worked with users and experts to further refine Delta’s non-POSIX file system to present a POSIX-like interface in addition to a POSIX-compliant file system. Most applications will be able to take advantage of the new file system without modification.
Usability and Accessibility
Delta provides a range of interfaces, from command-line to science gateways. To enhance the user experience across these systems, the Delta and DeltaAI teams have developed best practices for integrating interactive and batch computing with visualization. NCSA and the Delta Complex have partnered with experts at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s School of Information Sciences and Disability Resources & Educational Services, we aim to improve accessibility for individuals with visual or other impairments and share these advancements with the broader cyberinfrastructure community.
To request data, send an email to help@ncsa.illinois.edu with the subject “Delta systems data access.” Please include a description of the types of data you are interested in and your planned usage of the data.
SYSTEM OPERATIONS DATA
The Delta Complex team has been collecting a large amount of data regarding the operations of the system. Available by request only, the Delta Complex team is happy to make this data available to system researchers subject to some restrictions, including:
- Any resulting publication must include the Delta acknowledgment.
- No redistribution of the Delta data set.
- The Delta project must be allowed to review publications prior to submission to ensure statements made about Delta and data provided by Delta are accurate.
- Data including user-identifiable items (including job data) will be subject to additional restrictions.
EXACOMM
Delta provides a range of interfaces, from command-line to science gateways. To enhance the user experience across these systems, the Delta and DeltaAI teams have developed best practices for integrating interactive and batch computing with visualization. NCSA and the Delta Complex have partnered with experts at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s School of Information Sciences and Disability Resources & Educational Services, we aim to improve accessibility for individuals with visual or other impairments and share these advancements with the broader cyberinfrastructure community.
ExaComm, available on Delta as a module, is a GPU-Aware communication library developed by NCSA and UIUC collaborators. It has a compositional API for separating the collective pattern design from the machine-specific optimizations and it offers hyper primitives to design complicated collective communication patterns. ExaComm then optimizes the primitive pattern for a specified machine, that is described by the user. The implementation is achieved by using the point-to-point functions of the native MPI or NCCL libraries. Exacomm is just example of the ways in which the Delta Complex team continues to develop for the machines they manage. To learn more about ExaComm and how to enable it for your code use, visit the Delta documentation page.
