Enabling Co-Design of Multi-Layer Exascale Storage Architectures

Carothers, Christopher¹ 

[1] Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst., Troy, NY (United States)

关键词: Exascale Storage;    Modeling;    Parallel Simulation;   

DOI  :  10.2172/1311761
RP-ID  :  DOE-RPI--4875-1
PID  :  OSTI ID: 1311761

学科分类：数学（综合）

美国|英语

来源: SciTech Connect

【 摘 要 】

Growing demands for computing power in applications such as energy production, climate analysis, computational chemistry, and bioinformatics have propelled computing systems toward the exascale: systems with 10¹⁸ floating-point operations per second. These systems, to be designed and constructed over the next decade, will create unprecedented challenges in component counts, power consumption, resource limitations, and system complexity. Data storage and access are an increasingly important and complex component in extreme-scale computing systems, and significant design work is needed to develop successful storage hardware and software architectures at exascale. Co-design of these systems will be necessary to find the best possible design points for exascale systems. The goal of this work has been to enable the exploration and co-design of exascale storage systems by providing a detailed, accurate, and highly parallel simulation of exascale storage and the surrounding environment. Specifically, this simulation has (1) portrayed realistic application checkpointing and analysis workloads, (2) captured the complexity, scale, and multilayer nature of exascale storage hardware and software, and (3) executed in a timeframe that enables ???what if'??? exploration of design concepts. We developed models of the major hardware and software components in an exascale storage system, as well as the application I/O workloads that drive them. We used our simulation system to investigate critical questions in reliability and concurrency at exascale, helping guide the design of future exascale hardware and software architectures. Additionally, we provided this system to interested vendors and researchers so that others can explore the design space. We validated the capabilities of our simulation environment by configuring the simulation to represent the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility Blue Gene/Q system and comparing simulation results for application I/O patterns to the results of executions of these I/O kernels on the actual system.