Historically, storage system architectures have taken a back seat to achieving peak floating-point processor performance in supercomputer design. The classic mistake, made in almost every supercomputer ever built, is to construct fast but proprietary hardware and software interfaces into local disk storage, which becomes an isolated, relatively small, and from the data centre perspective, nearly inaccessible island of storage.
With the advent of storage area networking standards like iSCSI and Fibre Channel, and the maturity of distributed file system protocols like NFS, the artificial dichotomy between local supercomputer storage and the pre- and post-processing computer systems (that must feed data to and absorb data from the supercomputer) is no longer necessary. We will discuss these new kinds of storage architectures in the context of existing and evolving standards for parallel IO in computer systems being used in HPC data centres.
Biography
Dr. Matthew O'Keefe is the Founder and CTO of Sistina Software. Matt's achievements include development and demonstration of the industry's first cluster file system running over a Fibre Channel SAN at the 1997 NAB conference; the publication of more than 60 technical papers; and chairing, organising and presenting at multiple workshops on cluster computing and storage management. He is a senior member of IEEE as well as a member of its Technical Committee on Mass Storage Systems, and served on the National Academy of Science panel on improving the effectiveness of U.S. climate modelling This panel's recommendations regarding the loss of U.S. competitiveness in high performance computing, controversial at the time, have been vindicated by recent Japanese supercomputers which have completely eclipsed U.S. capabilities. Matt received his M.S. and Ph.D. Degrees in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University in 1986 and 1990, respectively.
