UNITY: Unified Memory and Storage Space
Ada Gavrilovska, USDOE Office of Science (SC) · 2020
UNITY is a 36-month project focused on providing design and evaluate a new distributed storage paradigm that unifies the traditionally distinct application views of memory- and file-based data storage into a single scalable and resilient environment. The project is a collaboration among Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL, Lead institution), Los Alamos National Labs (LANL), and Georgia Tech (GT). The main contributions of the GT team have been around development of low level systems software for best leveraging the capabilities of new types of persistent memory technologies, and for development of methods for intelligent data management across memory/storage substrates with heterogeneous components. GT contributed the Phoenix library for optimized checkpoint/restart for HPC I/O for systems with non-volatile memory (NVM), the NVStream library for NVM-specialized streaming I/O for HPC workflows, the CoMerge, Mnemo and Kleio solutions for intelligent data management on NVM-based systems. These contributions result in significant improvements in both application performance and system efficiency.