Publications

J. Cope, K. Iskra, D. Kimpe, and R. Ross, "Bridging HPC and Grid File I/O with IOFSL," Preprint ANL/MCS-P1816-1210, December 2010. [pdf]

Traditionally there has been little interaction between the Grid and High-Performance Computing (HPC) storage research communities. Grid research often focused on optimizing data accesses for high-latency, wide-area networks while HPC research focused on optimizing data accesses for local, high-performance storage systems. Recent software and hardware trends are blurring the distinction between Grids and HPC. In this paper, we investigate the use of I/O forwarding---a well established technique in leadership-class HPC machines---in a Grid context. We show that the problems that triggered the introduction of I/O forwarding for HPC systems also apply to contemporary Grid computing environments. We present the design of our I/O forwarding infrastructure for Grid computing environments. Finally, we discuss the advantages our infrastructure provides for Grids, such as simplied application data management in heterogeneous computing environments and support for multiple application I/O interfaces.