High-performance I/O using MEMS-based Storage for Scientific Applications

Overview

MEMS-based storage systems are potentially a whole new storage technology capable of a dramatic decrease in entry cost, access time, volume, mass, power dissipation, failure rate, and shock sensitivity. The MEMS-based storage device is intended to fill the large RAM/disk access gap and to create complete system-on-a-chip solutions for computer systems. It can also be designed to take the place of traditional storage system using hard disks and/or tapes to achieve either higher performance or better reliability.

In our research, we are using MEMS-based storage in parallel I/O system to largely improve parallel I/O performance. The high performance, distinguished two-dimensional data layout and access method, and the built-in parallelism make it possible to improve performance for current parallel I/O system using this new type of storage device, especially for parallel scientific applications and those reading/writing multi-dimensional arrays in various access patterns. We create an infrastructure to study the performance impact of MEMS-based storage on modern parallel I/O system and try to design software optimizations for such system to improve the I/O performance for various access patterns discovered in scientific applications.

Research Topics

Infrastructure

We implemented an infrastructure to simulate/emulate parallel I/O. There are three levels in this infrastructure: client w/ local storage, parallel file system, I/O server w/ end storage, as in Figure 1. In current implementation, each client can make I/O request providing arguments (file, offset, len, buffer), while the servers will perform underlying I/O by sending storage request and providing arguments (block\#, block-offset, len) to the end storage. Clients can do caching/buffering of data in their local storage, which has not been implemented currently.


Figure 1. Parallel I/O Infrastructure Using MEMS-based Storage


In this infrastructure, there are two places that may benefit from MEMS: we can either put MEMS in the remote storage for general purpose performance improvement (maybe more than that) or put it in local storage for caching/buffering optimizations. Above this infrastructure, we can run different kinds of applications with various interesting access patterns, just requiring them to feed their I/O requests to the clients in the form of (file, offset, len, buffer).

People

Alok Choudhary, Jianwei Li, Wei-keng Liao (Northwestern University)
Rob Ross, Rajeev Thakur (Argonne National Laboratory)

Related Links

References

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last updated 03/30/2004