Scalable I/O forwarding framework for high-performance computing systems

—Current leadership-class machines suffer from a significant imbalance between their computational power and their I/O bandwidth. While Moore’s law ensures that the computational power of high-performance computing systems increases with every generation, the same is not true for their I/O subsystems. The scalability challenges faced by existing parallel file systems with respect to the increasing number of clients, coupled with the minimalistic compute node kernels running on these machines, call for a new I/O paradigm to meet the requirements of data-intensive scientific applications. I/O forwarding is a technique that attempts to bridge the increasing performance and scalability gap between the compute and I/O components of leadership-class machines by shipping I/O calls from compute nodes to dedicated I/O nodes. The I/O nodes perform operations on behalf of the compute nodes and can reduce file system traffic by aggregating, rescheduling, and caching I/O requests. This pap...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CLUSTER
• Authors: Nawab Ali, Philip H. Carns, Kamil Iskra, Dries Kimpe, Samuel Lang, Robert Latham, Robert B. Ross, Lee Ward, P. Sadayappan
• Keywords: CLUSTER 2009, Cluster Computing, Compute Nodes, I/O Forwarding, I/O Nodes