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Some Open Problems in Supercomputing I/O

January 29, 2008

  • Date: Tuesday, January 29, 2008 
  • Time: 11 am — 12:15 pm 
  • Place: ME 218

Lee Ward
Sandia National Laboratories

Abstract: The dominant paradigm for I/O interfaces and implementation in the supercomputing world is based on the POSIX standards. While this is well known to be sub-optimal, many acceptable mitigation strategies and alternative approaches have not yet been investigated. This talk will give a quick overview of a few current, popular, representative, system I/O architectures, application I/O strategies, and I/O middleware. Then, we will examine and discuss a consensus-based list of open problems in the field that is used by various U.S. government agencies, such as DOE and NSF, to motivate research proposals.

Bio: Lee Ward is a principal member of technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories. As an inveterate student of operating systems and file systems, his interests have provided the opportunity to make contributions in high performance, parallel file systems, IO libraries, hierarchical storage management, and compute cluster integration/management systems.

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