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Unified Virtual Memory (UVM) was recently introduced with CUDA version 8 and the Pascal GPU. The older CUDA programming style is akin to older large-memory UNIX applications which used to directly load and unload memory segments. Newer CUDA programs have started taking advantage of UVM for the same reasons of superior programmability that UNIX applications long ago switched to assuming the presence of virtual memory. Therefore, checkpointing of UVM has become increasing important, especially as NVIDIA CUDA continues to gain wider popularity: 87 of the top 500 supercomputers in the latest listings use NVIDIA GPUs, with a current trend of ten additional NVIDIA-based supercomputers each year. A new scalable checkpointing mechanism, CRUM (Checkpoint-Restart for Unified Memory), is demonstrated for hybrid CUDA/MPI computations across multiple computer nodes. The support for UVM is particularly attractive for programs requiring more memory than resides on the GPU, since the alternative to UVM is for the application to directly copy memory between device and host. Furthermore, CRUM supports a fast, forked checkpointing, which mostly overlaps the CUDA computation with storage of the checkpoint image in stable storage. The runtime overhead of using CRUM is 6% on average, and the time for forked checkpointing is seen to be a factor of up to 40 times less than traditional, synchronous checkpointing. 

Previous studies showed that a series of purified condensed tannins (CTs) from warm-season perennial legumes exhibited high variability in their modulation of methane production during in vitro rumen digestion. The molecular weight differences between these CTs did not provide correlation with either the in vitro CH4 production or the ability to precipitate bovine serum albumin. In an effort to delineate other structure-activity relationships from these methane abatement experiments, the structures of purified CTs from these legumes were assessed with a combination of methanolysis, quantitative thiolysis, 1H-13C HSQC NMR spectroscopy and ultrahigh-resolution MALDI-TOF MS. The composition of these CTs is very diverse: procyanidin/prodelphinidin (PC/PD) ratios ranged from 98/2 to 2/98; cis/trans ratios ranged from 98/2 to 34/66; mean degrees of polymerization ranged from 6 to 39; and % galloylation ranged from 0 to 75%. No strong correlation was observed between methane production and the protein precipitation capabilities of the CT towards three different proteins (BSA, lysozyme, and alfalfa leaf protein) at ruminal pH. However, a strong non-linear correlation was observed for the inhibition of methane production versus the antioxidant activity in plant sample containing typical PC- and PD-type CTs. The modulation of methane production could not be correlated to the CT structure (PC/PD or cis/trans ratios and extent of galloylation). The most active plant in methane abatement was Acacia angustissima, which contained CT, presenting an unusual challenge as it was resistant to standard thiolytic degradation conditions and exhibited an atypical set of cross-peak signals in the 2D NMR. The MALDI analysis supported a 5-deoxy flavan-3-ol-based structure for the CT from this plant.