IOFSL : I/O Forwarding Scalability Layer

PIs:
Peter Beckman, Rob Ross

People Involved:
Philip Carns, Jason Cope, Kamil Iskra, Dries Kimpe, Robert Latham

Additional People:
James Nunez , John Bent , Gary Grider , Steve Poole , Lee Ward , Terry Jones

Other Institutes:
LANL , ORNL , Sandia

Funding:
DOE Office of Science

[project website]

Abstract:
This project will design, build, and distribute a scalable, unified high-end computing I/O forwarding software layer that will be adopted and supported by DOE Office of Science and NNSA. This layer will:
(1) Provide function shipping at the file system interface level (without requiring middleware) that enables asynchronous coalescing and I/O without jeopardizing determinism for computation
(2) Offload file system function from simple or full OS client processes to a variety of targets, from another core or hardware on the same system to an I/O node on a conventional cluster or a service node on a leadership class system
(3) Reduce the number of file system operations/clients that the parallel file system sees
(4) Support any/all parallel file system solutions
(5) Integrate with MPI-IO and any hardware features designed to support efficient parallel I/O