New technology continues to offer better solutions for researchers, as RCC happily witnessed at a national meeting earlier this month over software for high-performance computing.
RCC hosted the national, CSIRO-organised Data Management Framework (DMF) Users Group meeting at UQ, 6–7 June.
Currently, RCC and QRIScloud operator QCIF both use DMF servers as part of HPC infrastructure to service the data storage and data analysis needs of researchers.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), DMF’s vendor, flew two people from its US software development team to talk about the big changes to the new version of DMF (DMF 7), which is a major rewrite, and provide an opportunity for current users (including RCC) to ask questions.
Martin Nicholls, RCC's Specialist Systems Programmer, said the most significant feature of DMF 7 is its ability to scale to larger numbers of files. “Together, both RCC and QCIF have more files than would fit into one single server, so this scaling is important. It [DMF 7] enables RCC and QCIF to efficiently manage the ever-increasing amount of research data,” he said.
A projected feature of DMF 7 (due mid-2019) will provide closer integration with MeDiCI, UQ’s high-performance data storage fabric, which provides seamless access to data regardless of where they are created, manipulated and archived. MeDiCI connects the UQ campus and QRIScloud data storage with the off-site data centre UQ and QRIScloud uses.
RCC Director Prof. David Abramson presented a talk about MeDiCI (Metropolitan Data Caching Infrastructure) at the DMF Users Group meeting.
Some technical questions asked at the meeting provided the HPE development team with feedback to ensure that features essential to RCC and QCIF were incorporated into the product as early as possible.
Almost 40 people attended the meeting, including 15 vendors and 24 DMF customers.
