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

State of the Art and Future Trends in Data Reduction for High-Performance Computing

Research into data reduction techniques has gained popularity in recent years as storage capacity and performance become a growing concern. This survey paper provides an overview of leveraging points found in high-performance computing (HPC) systems and suitable mechanisms to reduce data volumes. We present the underlying theories and their application throughout the HPC stack and also discuss related hardware acceleration and reduction approaches. After introducing relevant use-cases, an overview of modern lossless and lossy compression algorithms and their respective usage at the application and file system layer is given. In anticipation of their increasing relevance for adaptive and in situ approaches, dimensionality reduction techniques are summarized with a focus on non-linear feature extraction. Adaptive approaches and in situ compression algorithms and frameworks follow. The key stages and new opportunities to deduplication are covered next. An unconventional but promising method is recomputation, which is proposed at last. We conclude the survey with an outlook on future developments