Future Technologies Colloquium Series


Rethinking I/O in High-Performance Computing Environments


Nawab Ali
The Ohio State University
August 28, 2009
10:00 AM

ORNL, Bldg. 5100, RM 130

Host: Philip C. Roth (rothpc@ornl.gov)


ABSTRACT:

As the types of problems we solve in high-performance computing and other areas become more complex, the amount of data generated and used is growing at a rapid rate. Today many terabytes of data are common; tomorrow petabytes of data will be the norm. One of the challenges in high-performance computing is to provide applications with high-speed data access in a distributed, heterogeneous environment. In this talk, we will review the existing I/O paradigms in high-performance computing environments and examine better alternatives across both local and wide-area networks. We propose three different techniques to accommodate the I/O requirements of scientific applications. We present a new design for a high-performance, scalable parallel file system that obviates the need for dedicated I/O and metadata servers by utilizing object-based storage devices. We also propose a new remote I/O paradigm that takes advantage of the increasing popularity of high-speed networks and centralized data repositories to perform I/O over wide-area networks. Furthermore, we present a scalable I/O forwarding framework that bridges the increasing performance gap between the processing power and the I/O subsystems of massively parallel leadership-class machines such as the IBM Blue Gene/P.

BIO:

Nawab Ali is a PhD candidate with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Ohio State University. His research interests span the broad areas of computer architecture, operating systems, and high-performance computing. His current research focuses on issues related to I/O in high-performance computing environments.

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