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Storage wall for exascale supercomputing

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Abstract

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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, China

    Wei Hu, Guang-ming Liu, Qiong Li, Yan-huang Jiang & Gui-lin Cai

  2. National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, Tianjin, 300457, China

    Guang-ming Liu

Authors
  1. Wei Hu
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  2. Guang-ming Liu
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  4. Yan-huang Jiang
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  5. Gui-lin Cai
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Correspondence to Wei Hu.

Additional information

Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 61272141 and 61120106005) and the National High-Tech R&D Program (863) of China (No. 2012AA01A301)

ORCID: Wei HU, http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8839-7748

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Hu, W., Liu, Gm., Li, Q. et al. Storage wall for exascale supercomputing. Frontiers Inf Technol Electronic Eng 17, 1154–1175 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1631/FITEE.1601336

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