Developing Integrated Data Services for Cray Systems with a Gemini Interconnect.
Todd Kordenbrock, Ron A. Oldfield · 2012
Over the past several years, there has been increasing interest in injecting a layer of compute resources between a high-performance computing application and the end storage devices. For some projects, the objective is to present the parallel le system with a reduced set of clients, making it easier for le-system vendors to support extreme-scale systems. In other cases, the objective is to use these resources as staging areas to aggregate data or cache bursts of I/O operations. Still others use these staging areas for in-situ analysis on data in-transit between the application and the storage system. To simplify our discussion, we adopt the general term Integrated Data Services to represent these use-cases. This paper describes how we provide user-level, integrated data services for Cray systems that use the Gemini Interconnect. In particular, we describe our implementation and performance results on the Cray XE6, Cielo, at Los Alamos National Laboratory.