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Scalable IO

The Scalable I/O (SIO) effort at Sandia National Laboratories addresses the need for efficient input/output capabilities for the next-generation ultra-scale computers for the Department of Energy (DOE) Accelerated Strategic Computing (ASC) program. Over the past 15 years, Sandia has developed expertise in developing custom solutions to meet the I/O needs of scientific applications for the Massively Parallel Processor supercomputers at Sandia. Although past efforts focused on internal development, the more recent focus is to collaborate with vendors and researchers in an effort to promote and guide development of parallel file systems and I/O libraries that can support peta-flop scale architectures of the next-generation ASC computers.

 
  
Sandia's high-performance disk storage system (Saturn) for the Vplant, Edison, Tesla, and Cplant computer systems.   The Saturn storage system provides 100 TB (82 TB useable) of
storage through LSI and DataDirect RAIDs using a 1 Gb/sec and 2 Gb/sec Fibre Channel network.

Research and Development at Sandia:

I/O Characterization

  • Sandia is collaborating with the Genomes to Life project to characterize I/O requirements for large-scale computational biology applications.
    (Contact: H. Lee Ward)

File Systems

  • Extended NFS (ENFS) is an open-source effort (initiated by Sandia Laboratories) to develop a portable, user-level virtual file system (VFS) that provides an NFS v2 front end and a BSD-like VFS backend. It was originally designed for the CPLANT supercluster.
    (Contact: H. Lee Ward)
  • In collaboration with the University of Michigan, Sandia is investigating modifications to the IETF draft NFSV4 protocol to accomplish parallel I/O.
    (Contacts: H. Lee Ward along with Tyce Mclarty - LLNL and Gary Grider - LANL)
  • In collaboration with the University of California Santa Cruz, Sandia is involved in research associated with object-based storage and distributed metadata systems.
    (Contacts: H. Lee Ward along with Tyce Mclarty - LLNL and Gary Grider - LANL)
  • Sandia is an active participant in the ASC PathForward program that works with industry to develop scalable storage solutions for systems that scale to 100 TFLOPS and beyond. (Contacts: H. Lee Ward along with Tyce Mclarty - LLNL and Gary Grider - LANL)
  • Sandia Laboratories is investigating the use of existing open-source and industrial storage technologies for use with ASC computers. The particular systems of interest include Panasas, Lustre, and PVFS.
    (Contacts: Sonja Tideman [Evaluation of Panasas and Lustre], Ruth A. Klundt [Evaluation of PVFS])

Scalable I/O libraries and interfaces

  • In collaboration with Northwestern University, Sandia National Laboratories is developing extensions to MPI-IO that improve scalability.
    (Contacts: Eric D. Russell and Aloc Choudhary - Northwestern University)
  • In collaboration with Cray, Sandia has developed a POSIX-like application programmer interface for I/O on light-weight compute nodes.
    (Contact: H. Lee Ward)
  • Portals is a low-overhead messaging passing library uses on ASC computers.
    (Contact: Ron B. Brightwell)
  • PDS/PIO is a lightweight, parallel interface designed for the efficient transfer of grid-based simulation data.
    (Contact: Judith E. Sturtevant)
  • Salvo I/O is a parallel I/O interface designed specifically for the seismic imaging code Salvo. (Contact: Ron A. Oldfield)
  • Sandia is actively involved in improving the scalability and reliability of existing intermediate I/O libraries such as MPI-IO, parallel HDF-5, and the Data Object Library.
    (Contact: Eric D. Russell)
  • Sandia is working with Cluster File Systems Incorporated to integrate the Portals messaging protocol into the Lustre parallel file system.
    (Contact: Ron B. Brightwell)
  • Sets and Fields (SAF) is an I/O library for the SIERRA framework for computational physics. (Contact: Greg D. Sjaardema)
  • SYSIO is an application-level I/O library that provides virtual file system capabilities on the compute nodes of ASC computers.
    (Contact: H. Lee Ward)

Program Contact: Neil D. Pundit


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Maintained by: Bernadette M. Watts
Modified on: May 6, 2008