While distributed memory systems have shaped the field of distributed systems for decades, the demand for many-core shared memory resources is increasing. Symmetric Multiprocessor Systems (SMPs) have become increasingly important recently among a wide array of disciplines, ranging from Bioinformatics to astrophysics, and beyond. With the increase in big data computing, the size and scope of traditional commodity server systems is often outpaced. While some big data applications can be mapped to distributed memory systems found through many cluster and cloud technologies today, this effort represents a large barrier of entry that some projects cannot cross. Shared memory SMP systems look to effectively and efficiently fill this niche within distributed systems by providing high throughput and performance with minimized development effort, as the computing environment often represents what many researchers are already familiar with. In this paper, we look at the use of two common shared memory systems, the ScaleMP vSMP virtualized SMP deployment at Indiana University, and the SGI UV architecture deployed at University of Arizona. While both systems are notably different in their design, their potential impact on computing is remarkably similar. As such, we look to compare each system first under a set of OpenMP threaded benchmarks via the SPEC group, and to follow up with our experience using each machine for Trinity de-novo assembly. We find both SMP systems are well suited to support various big data applications, with the newer vSMP deployment often slightly faster; however, certain caveats and performance considerations are necessary when considering such SMP systems.

Hafnium oxide (HfO₂)-based ferroelectric field-effect transistor (FeFET) is an attractive device for nonvolatile memory. However, when compared to the well-established flash devices, the memory window (MW) of FeFETs reported so far is rather limited, which might be an obstacle to practical applications. In this article, we report on FeFETs fabricated in the 28-nm high-𝑘 metal gate (HKMG) bulk technology with 90 and 80 nm for the channel length and width, respectively, which show a large MW of nearly 3 V. This is achieved by adopting 20-nm-thick HfO₂ films in the gate stack instead of the usually employed 10-nm-thick films. We show that such a thickness increase leads to only a moderate increase of the switching voltages, and to a significantly improved resilience of the memory characteristics upon the parasitic charge trapping. The devices display a good retention at high temperatures and endure more than 10⁵ bipolar cycles, thus supporting this technology for a future generation of FeFET memories.