View article

In-system solid state storage is expected to be an important component of the I/O subsystem on the first exascale platforms, as it has the potential to reduce DRAM requirements, to increase system reliability, and to smooth I/O loads.

This paper describes the design of a prototype, integrated in-system storage architecture that we are developing to serve the diverse needs of high performance computing. Our container abstraction will provide lightweight management of in-system storage devices, as well as methods to access containers remotely and to transfer them within the storage hierarchy. We are also working on a storage hierarchy abstraction API to provide portable HPC I/O software with the critical information on the configuration of the system on which it is running. As currently available large-scale HPC systems lack in-system storage, we are developing a solid state storage simulator backed by DRAM. We …