Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
FIGURE 6.5: PLFS N-to-1 application I/O speed-ups. [Image courtesy of John
Bent (LANL).]
6.4 Conclusion
LANL is innovative in its implementation of an HPC infrastructure, as
they are early adopters of parallel file systems, globally shared parallel file
systems, and burst buffers; but this also may lead to future challenges. They
pushed users to use N-to-1 with a lot of self-describing information in their
I/O, and the users have suffered poor performance, but middleware is now
available that makes N-to-1 perform well.
One important part of LANL's I/O strategy is to be involved in the na-
tional community. Some examples include:
Helping to actively coordinate the Path Forward activity to bring prod-
ucts, like Lustre and Panasas, to fruition;
Helping to coordinate the High End Computing Inter-Agency Work-
ing Group File Systems [1] and I/O effort that helped to form a large
community around HPC I/O and storage issues;
Helping to coordinate the DOE Fast Forward Storage project [5], which
targets prototypes for future I/O and storage solutions toward exascale-
class computing.
