A shiny, new graph query system
As computing tools and expertise used in conducting scientific research continue to expand, so have the enormity and diversity of the data being collected. Developed at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the Graph Engine for Multithreaded Systems, or GEMS, is a multilayer software system for semantic graph databases. In their work, scientists from PNNL and NVIDIA Research examined how GEMS answered queries on science metadata and compared its scaling performance against generated benchmark data sets. They showed that GEMS could answer queries over science metadata in seconds and scaled well to larger quantities of data. They also demonstrated that GEMS generally outperformed a custom-hardware solution, showing the feasibility of using cheaper, commodity hardware to obtain comparable performance.