A publication of the Advanced Simulation & Computing Division, NA-121.2, NNSA Defense Programs
September 2008
NA-ASC-500-08—Issue 8
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Project Provides Thirteen Years of Industry-Shaping Deliverables
Over the past 13 years, the ASC File Systems and I/O project has provided products used by the ASC program directly, leveraged and shaped the HPC industry, and built and shaped the HPC file systems and I/O community.
The (former) ASCI Path Forward Program had two projects that were particularly noteworthy. The first Path Forward Global Parallel File System project was instrumental in guiding the design of the Panasas® File System, one of the most popular global parallel file systems in industry and in use in production at Los Alamos. The second project was the guiding force behind the Lustre® file system, also a top parallel file system industry competitor and in use at Sandia and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories.
The ASCI Level 3 Alliance Program and its descendants have three projects that have produced important results. The partnership with University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) has provided the world’s only open source research object parallel file system. The University of Michigan partnership produced NFSv4 and parallel NFS (pNFS), an IETF standard advancement of the NFS protocol. NFSv4 will be deployed at the three laboratories in the next two years. Additionally, the partnership with Northwestern University produced enhancements to the MPI-IO (ROMIO) parallel I/O library to help with small and unaligned I/O, the hardest I/O pattern for parallel file systems to deal with.
Since 2005, the ASC Program, in partnership with Office of Science, Department of Defense, and NASA, has been coordinating the High End Computing (HEC) Inter-agency Working Group File Systems and I/O (FSIO) technical advisory group, as well as coordinating all HEC government agency investments in the FSIO area. In the last four years this group has assisted with soliciting, awarding, and managing about $20M in FSIO R&D investments in over 25 projects with dozens of universities, national labs, and industry.
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