Storage challenge---Trading memory for disk
Troy Benjegerdes, Brett Bode, Kyle Schochenmaier · 2006
We present a novel approach for using high performance network attached parallel storage for out-of-core computation. Our approach utilizes many parallel disks and storage controllers with a near 1:1 ratio of compute nodes to storage servers. This, when combined with 30 Gigabit 12X InfiniBand interconnects, allows remote storage subsystem bandwidth to reach the same performance level as local memory-cache file I/O performance. This combination allows computational chemistry application problem sizes which require more than 100GB of intermediate data to store this data on disk without the disk I/O subsystem becoming the limiting factor. With sequential storage access speeds on the same order of magnitude as main memory performance, this allows out-of-core computation to become practical due to disk storage size being several orders of magnitude cheaper per GB than main memory storage.