Seminars & Events

Mathematics and Computer Science Division
"DAOS containers - a storage abstraction for exascale"

DATE: October 21, 2011 to October 21, 2011
TIME: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
SPEAKER: Eric Barton, Chief Technical Officer, Whamcloud Limited
LOCATION: Building 240, Conference Room, 4301, Argonne National Laboratory
HOST: Rob Ross

Description:
Exascale is the next grand challenge for parallel file systems.
Concurrency orders of magnitude higher than what is seen today will
test the scalability of the storage system as never before and an
explosion of data and, most importantly application metadata will
test current parallel filesystems models beyond breaking point.

This talk proposes a new model of I/O that replaces the single contiguous byte array that is a conventional file with object storage containers that guarantee scalability for distributed applications without polluting the filesystem namespace. Safe application-level access to object storage allows the creation of a common storage API that expresses concurrency explicitly so that many different high level I/O models tailored to different application domains can be layered above it cleanly without loss of scalability or performance.

Eric Barton has worked in HPC since the 1985, when he co-founded Meiko Scientific to build clustered supercomputers. He has worked on all aspects of HPC systems software development from communications and middleware libraries down to low-level drivers and has a special interest in parallel file systems. Since 2002, he has worked exclusively on the Lustre file system, initially taking responsibility for its networking layer and more recently at Sun, Oracle and now Whamcloud as the main Lustre architect.

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