Storage wall for exascale supercomputing  

作　　者：Wei HU Guang-ming LIU Qiong LI Yan-huang JIANG Gui-lin CAI 

机构地区：[1]College of Computer,National University of Defense Technology,Changsha 410073,China [2]National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin,Tianjin 300457,China

出　　处：《Frontiers of Information Technology & Electronic Engineering》2016年第11期1154-1175,共22页信息与电子工程前沿（英文版）

基　　金：the National Natural Science Foundation of China(Nos.61272141 and 61120106005);the National High-Tech R&D Program(863)of China(No.2012AA01A301)

摘　　要：The mismatch between compute performance and I/O performance has long been a stumbling block as supercomputers evolve from petaflops to exaflops. Currently, many parallel applications are I/O intensive,and their overall running times are typically limited by I/O performance. To quantify the I/O performance bottleneck and highlight the significance of achieving scalable performance in peta/exascale supercomputing, in this paper, we introduce for the first time a formal definition of the ‘storage wall' from the perspective of parallel application scalability. We quantify the effects of the storage bottleneck by providing a storage-bounded speedup,defining the storage wall quantitatively, presenting existence theorems for the storage wall, and classifying the system architectures depending on I/O performance variation. We analyze and extrapolate the existence of the storage wall by experiments on Tianhe-1A and case studies on Jaguar. These results provide insights on how to alleviate the storage wall bottleneck in system design and achieve hardware/software optimizations in peta/exascale supercomputing.The mismatch between compute performance and I/O performance has long been a stumbling block as supercomputers evolve from petaflops to exaflops. Currently, many parallel applications are I/O intensive,and their overall running times are typically limited by I/O performance. To quantify the I/O performance bottleneck and highlight the significance of achieving scalable performance in peta/exascale supercomputing, in this paper, we introduce for the first time a formal definition of the ‘storage wall＇ from the perspective of parallel application scalability. We quantify the effects of the storage bottleneck by providing a storage-bounded speedup,defining the storage wall quantitatively, presenting existence theorems for the storage wall, and classifying the system architectures depending on I/O performance variation. We analyze and extrapolate the existence of the storage wall by experiments on Tianhe-1A and case studies on Jaguar. These results provide insights on how to alleviate the storage wall bottleneck in system design and achieve hardware/software optimizations in peta/exascale supercomputing.

关 键 词：Storage-bounded speedup Storage wall High performance computing Exascale computing 

分 类 号：TP338[自动化与计算机技术—计算机系统结构]