Towards green scientific data compression through high-level I/O interfaces

Every HPC system today has to cope with a deluge of data generated by scientific applications, simulations or large- scale experiments. The upscaling of supercomputer systems and infrastructures, generally results in a dramatic increase of their energy consumption. In this paper, we argue that techniques like data compression can lead to significant gains in terms of power efficiency by reducing both network and storage requirements. To that end, we propose a novel methodology for achieving on-the-fly intelligent determination of energy efficient data reduction for a given data set by leveraging state-of-the-art compression algorithms and meta data at application-level I/O. We motivate our work by analyzing the energy and storage saving needs of real-life scientific HPC applications, and review the various compression techniques that can be applied. We find that the resulting data reduction can decrease the data volume transferred and stored by as much as 80% in some cases, consequently leading to significant savings in storage and networking costs

Survey of storage systems for high-performance computing

In current supercomputers, storage is typically provided by parallel distributed file systems for hot data and tape archives for cold data. These file systems are often compatible with local file systems due to their use of the POSIX interface and semantics, which eases development and debugging because applications can easily run both on workstations and supercomputers. There is a wide variety of file systems to choose from, each tuned for different use cases and implementing different optimizations. However, the overall application performance is often held back by I/O bottlenecks due to insufficient performance of file systems or I/O libraries for highly parallel workloads. Performance problems are dealt with using novel storage hardware technologies as well as alternative I/O semantics and interfaces. These approaches have to be integrated into the storage stack seamlessly to make them convenient to use. Upcoming storage systems abandon the traditional POSIX interface and semantics in favor of alternative concepts such as object and key-value storage; moreover, they heavily rely on technologies such as NVM and burst buffers to improve performance. Additional tiers of storage hardware will increase the importance of hierarchical storage management. Many of these changes will be disruptive and require application developers to rethink their approaches to data management and I/O. A thorough understanding of today's storage infrastructures, including their strengths and weaknesses, is crucially important for designing and implementing scalable storage systems suitable for demands of exascale computing

Could Blobs Fuel Storage-Based Convergence Between HPC and Big Data?

International audienceThe increasingly growing data sets processed on HPC platforms raise major challenges for the underlying storage layer. A promising alternative to POSIX-IO-compliant file systems are simpler blobs (binary large objects), or object storage systems. They offer lower overhead and better performance at the cost of largely unused features such as file hierarchies or permissions. Similarly, blobs are increasingly considered for replacing distributed file systems for big data analytics or as a base for storage abstractions like key-value stores or time-series databases. This growing interest in such object storage on HPC and big data platforms raises the question: Are blobs the right level of abstraction to enable storage-based convergence between HPC and Big Data? In this paper we take a first step towards answering the question by analyzing the applicability of blobs for both platforms

Mission Possible: Unify HPC and Big Data Stacks Towards Application-Defined Blobs at the Storage Layer

International audienceHPC and Big Data stacks are completely separated today. The storage layer offers opportunities for convergence, as the challenges associated with HPC and Big Data storage are similar: trading versatility for performance. This motivates a global move towards dropping file-based, POSIX-IO compliance systems. However, on HPC platforms this is made difficult by the centralized storage architecture using file-based storage. In this paper we advocate that the growing trend of equipping HPC compute nodes with local storage redistributes the cards by enabling object storage to be deployed alongside the application on the compute nodes. Such integration of application and storage not only allows fine-grained configuration of the storage system, but also improves application portability across platforms. In addition, the single-user nature of such application-specific storage obviates the need for resource-consuming storage features like permissions or file hierarchies offered by traditional file systems. In this article we propose and evaluate Blobs (Binary Large Objects) as an alternative to distributed file systems. We factually demonstrate that it offers drop-in compatibility with a variety of existing applications while improving storage throughput by up to 28%