[Colloquium] Seminar Announcement: Making a Case for Distributed File Systems at Exascales - TODAY!

[Ninfa Mayorga]

Computation Institute- Data Lunch Seminar (DLS)

Speaker: Ioan Raicu, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer  
Science, Illinois Institute of Technology
Date: May 13, 2011
Time: 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location: The University of Chicago, Searle 240A, 5735 S. Ellis Avenue

Making a Case for Distributed File Systems at Exascales

Abstract: Exascale computers will enable the unraveling of significant  
scientific mysteries. Predictions are that 2019 will be the year of  
exascales, with millions of compute nodes and billions of threads of  
execution. The current state-of-the-art storage (but decades-old  
approach) in High-End Computing (HEC), in which storage is segregated  
from compute nodes and connected by a network, will not scale with the  
expected exponential growth in concurrency. At exascales, basic  
functionality at high concurrency levels will suffer poor performance,  
and combined with system mean-time-to-failure in hours, will lead to a  
performance collapse for heroic applications. Storage has the  
potential to be the Achilles heel of exascale systems. We propose that  
future HEC systems be designed with non-volatile memory on every  
compute node. Every compute node would actively participate in the  
metadata and data management, leveraging many-core processors high  
bisection bandwidth in torus networks. Distributed metadata management  
would be used, implemented in a distributed data-structure, tailored  
for HEC, supporting constant time operations by emphasizing  
trustworthy/reliable hardware, fast network interconnects, non- 
existent node "churn", low latencies, and scientific computing data- 
access patterns. The data would be partitioned and spread out over  
many nodes based on the data access patterns. Replication would be  
used to ensure data availability, and cooperative caching would  
deliver high aggregate throughput. Data would be indexed, by including  
descriptive, provenance, and system metadata on each file. There would  
be a variety of data-access semantics, from POSIX-like interfaces for  
generality, to relaxed semantics for increased scalability. This talk  
discusses this revolutionary new storage architecture that will make  
exascale computing more tractable, touching all disciplines in HEC,  
fueling scientific discovery and global economic development. This new  
architec ture will extend the knowledgebase beyond HEC into commodity  
systems as the fastest machines generally become mainstream systems in  
a matter of years.

Bio: Dr. Ioan Raicu is an assistant professor in the Department of  
Computer Science (CS) at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), as  
well as a guest research faculty in the Math and Computer Science  
Division (MCS) at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL). He is also the  
founder and director of the Data-Intensive Distributed Systems  
Laboratory (DataSys) at IIT. He has received the prestigious NSF  
CAREER award (2011 - 2015) for his innovative work on distributed file  
systems for exascale computing. He was a NSF/CRA Computation  
Innovation Fellow at Northwestern University in 2009 - 2010, and  
obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Chicago  
under the guidance of Dr. Ian Foster in March 2009. He is a 3-year  
award winner of the GSRP Fellowship from NASA Ames Research Center.  
His research work and interests are in the general area of distributed  
systems. His work focuses on a relatively new paradigm of Many-Task  
Computing (MTC), which aims to bridge the gap between tw o predominant  
paradigms from distributed systems, High-Throughput Computing (HTC)  
and High-Performance Computing (HPC). His work has focused on defining  
and exploring both the theory and practical aspects of realizing MTC  
across a wide range of large-scale distributed systems. He is  
particularly interested in resource management in large scale  
distributed systems with a focus on many-task computing, data  
intensive computing, cloud computing, grid computing, and many-core  
computing. His work has been funded by the NASA Ames Research Center,  
DOE Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, the NSF/CRA  
CIFellows program, and the NSF CAREER program. More information can be  
found at http://www.cs.iit.edu/~iraicu/ and http://datasys.cs.iit.edu/.


Information: Lunch will be provided



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.cs.uchicago.edu/pipermail/colloquium/attachments/20110513/a0f90911/attachment.htm