Monday, August 13, 2007

High End Computing File Systems and I/O Workshop 2007

HECIWG Executive Summary

The HECIWG is chartered by the The National Science and Technology Council's Subcommittee on Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD). The purpose of the IWG is to coordinate high-end computing (HEC) programs, budgets and policy recommendations. This includes identifying and integrating requirements, conducting joint program planning and devloping joint strategies for the HEC programs conducted by agencies that participate in the NITRD Program. A complete description of the HEC IWG can be found at NITRD's website.

HEC File Systems and I/O (HEC FSIO) Background

The need for immense and rapidly increasing scale in scientific computation drives the need for rapidly increasing scale in storage for scientific processing. Individual storage devices are rapidly getting denser while their bandwidth is not growing at the same pace. In the past several years, initial research into highly scalable file systems, high level Input/Output (I/O) libraries, and I/O middleware was done to provide some solutions to the problems that arise from massively parallel storage. To help plan for the research needs in the area of File Systems and I/O, the inter-government-agency document titled "HPC File Systems and Scalable I/O: Suggested Research and Development Topics for the Fiscal 2005-2009 Time Frame" was published which led the HECIWG to designate this area (FSIO) as a national focus area starting in FY06.

HEC FSIO Purpose

The HEC FSIO was created to advise the HECIWG in coordination of government R&D funding in HEC File Systems and I/O area so that the government's investment in this area of HEC is well spent, reduce gaps and overlaps. We are attempting to enable more and better R&D, and pass along the knowledge to the next generation.


Take a look. There's some good and interesting chewsy bits in there.

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