Seminars & Events

Computation Institute Lunch Presentation
"I/O at Petascale: Efficient File I/O on IBM Blue Gene"

DATE: November 13, 2008
TIME: 12:00 pm
SPEAKER: Kamil Iskra, Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory
LOCATION: Room A134, Bldg. 221, Argonne National Laboratory, RI405, 5640 S. Ellis Ave., University of Chicago

Description:
The largest massively parallel machines available today feature tens of thousands, or even over a hundred thousand, compute nodes. The I/O load generated by all those nodes is far beyond the design limits of typical commodity file I/O infrastructures.

To reduce the scalability issues, a layer of I/O nodes can be placed between the compute nodes and the file servers. I/O operations are function-shipped from the compute nodes to the I/O nodes. I/O nodes act as client reducers (each I/O node handles multiple compute nodes); they are also a convenient layer for implementing various optimizations.

In this talk, I will outline the design and implementation of ZOID - the ZeptoOS I/O Daemon - an alternative I/O forwarding infrastructure for IBM Blue Gene developed at Argonne. ZOID provides a high-performance, extensible, open source infrastructure that significantly exceeds the standard infrastructure in terms of flexibility. It has been used for real-time data processing in radio astronomy on Blue Gene/L and for many tasks computing (MTC) loads on Blue Gene/P. I will present our current results and outline the work in progress and plans for the future.

More Information:
Lunch will be provided at both locations
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