This year’s PDP edition is part of the dissemination activities of the European-funded project ADMIRE, which will also be an exhibitor at PDP 2023 Demo Area.
The main objective of the ADMIRE project is to establish control to avoid congestion and balance computational with storage to maximize performance. Unfortunately, appropriate interfaces and policies for managing such an enhanced I/O stack are still lacking. By creating an active I/O stack that dynamically adjusts computation and storage requirements through intelligent global coordination, the malleability of computation and I/O, and the scheduling of storage resources along all levels of the storage hierarchy. To achieve this, we will develop a software-defined framework based on scalable monitoring and control principles, separate control and data paths, and the orchestration of key system components and applications through embedded control points.
The current issue
The growing need to process extremely large data sets is one of the main drivers for building exascale HPC systems today. However, the flat storage hierarchies found in classic HPC architectures no longer satisfy the performance requirements of data-processing applications. Uncoordinated file access in combination with limited bandwidth makes the centralized back-end parallel file system a serious bottleneck. At the same time, emerging multi-tier storage hierarchies come with the potential to remove this barrier. Unfortunately, appropriate interfaces and policies for managing such an enhanced I/O stack are still lacking.
ADMIRE solution
The software-only solution proposed by the ADMIRE project will allow the throughput of HPC systems and the performance of individual applications to be substantially increased – and consequently, energy consumption to be decreased – by taking advantage of fast and power-efficient node-local storage tiers using novel, European ad-hoc storage systems and in-transit/in-situ processing facilities. Furthermore, an enhanced I/O stack will offer quality-of-service (QoS) and resilience. An integrated and operational prototype will be validated with several use cases from various domains, including climate/weather, life sciences, physics, remote sensing, and deep learning.
The Admire project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 JTI-EuroHPC research and innovation program, with grant Agreement number: 956748. Find more on admire-eurohpc.eu
Text and image edited from: admire-eurohpc.eu