Storage challenges at Los Alamos National Lab

Abstract

There yet exist no truly parallel file systems. Those that make the claim fall short when it comes to providing adequate concurrent write performance at large scale. This limitation causes large usability headaches in HPC. Users need two major capabilities missing from current parallel file systems. One, they need low latency interactivity. Two, they need high bandwidth for large parallel IO; this capability must be resistant to IO patterns and should not require tuning. There are no existing parallel file systems which provide these features. Frighteningly, exascale renders these features even less attainable from currently available parallel file systems. Fortunately, there is a path forward.