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As applications become increasingly data intensive, conventional computing systems become increasingly inefficient due to data access performance bottlenecks. While intensive efforts have been made in developing new memory technologies and in designing special purpose machines, there is a lack of solutions for evaluating and utilizing recent hardware advancements to address the memory-wall problem in a systematic way. In this study, we present the memory Layered Performance Matching (LPM) methodology to provide a systematic approach for data access performance optimization. LPM uniquely presents and utilizes the data access concurrency, in addition to data access locality, in a memory hierarchical system. The LPM methodology consists of models and algorithms, and is supported with a series of analytic results for its correctness. The rationale of LPM is to reduce the overall data access delay through the matching of data request rate and data supply rate at each layer of a memory hierarchy, with a balanced consideration of data locality, data concurrency, and latency hiding of data flow. Extensive experimentations on both physical platforms and software simulators confirm our theoretical findings, and they show that the LPM approach can be applied in diverse computing platforms and can effectively guide performance optimization of memory systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we consider a new caching model that enables data sharing for network services in a cost-effective way. The proposed caching algorithms are characterized by using monetary cost and access information to control the cache replacements, instead of exploiting capacity-oriented strategies as in traditional approaches. In particular, given a stream of requests to a shared data item with respect to a homogeneous cost model, we first propose a fast off-line algorithm using dynamic programming techniques, which can generate an optimal schedule within $O(mn)$ time-space complexity by using cache, migration as well as replication to serve a $n$ -length request sequence in a $m$ -node network, substantially improving the previous results. Furthermore, we also study the online form of this problem, and present an 3-competitive online algorithm by leveraging an idea of anticipatory caching. The algorithm can serve an online request in constant time and is space efficient in $O(m)$ as well, rendering it more practical in reality. We evaluate our algorithms, together with some variants, by conducting extensive simulation studies. Our results show that the optimal cost of the off-line algorithm is changed in a parabolic form as the ratio of caching cost to transfer cost is increased, and the online algorithm is less than 2 times worse in most cases than its optimal off-line counterpart. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-tiered Parallel I/O systems that combine traditional HDDs with emerging SSDs mitigate the cost burden of SSDs while benefiting from their superior I/O performance. While a multi-tiered parallel I/O system is promising for data-intensive applications in high-performance (HPC) domains, placing data on each tier of the system to achieve high I/O performance remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose a cost-aware region-level (CARL) data placement scheme in multi-tiered parallel I/O systems. CARL divides a large file into several small regions, and then places regions on different types of servers based on region access costs. CARL includes a static policy S-CARL and a dynamic policy D-CARL. For applications whose I/O access patterns are completely known, S-CARL calculates the region costs within the entire workload duration, and uses a static data placement scheme to selectively place regions on the proper servers. To adapt to applications whose access patterns are unknown in advance, D-CARL uses a dynamic data placement scheme which migrates data among different servers within each time window. We have implemented CARL under MPI-IO library and OrangeFS parallel file system environment. Our evaluation with representative benchmarks and an application shows that CARL is both feasible and able to improve I/O performance significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we consider to improve scientific workflows in cloud environments where data transfers between tasks are performed via provisioned in-memory caching as a service, instead of relying entirely on slower disk-based file systems. However, this improvement is not free since services in the cloud are usually charged in a “pay-as-you-go” model. As a consequence, the workflow tenants have to estimate the amount of memory that they would like to pay. Given the intrinsic complexity of the workflows, it would be very hard to make an accurate prediction, which would lead to either oversubscription or undersubscription, resulting in unproductive spending or performance degradation. To address this problem, we propose a concept of minmax memory claim (MMC) to achieve cost-effective workflow computations in in-memory cloud computing environments. The minmax-memory claim is defined as the minimum amount of memory required to finish the workflow without compromising its maximum concurrency. With the concept of MMC, the workflow tenants can achieve the best performance via in-memory computing while minimizing the cost. In this paper, we present the procedure of how to find the MMCs for those workflows with arbitrary graphs in general and develop optimal efficient algorithms for some well-structured workflows in particular. To further show the values of this concept, we also implement these algorithms and apply them, through a simulation study, to improve deadlock resolutions in workflow-based workloads when memory resources are constrained. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Parallel file systems (PFS) are widely-used to ease the I/O bottleneck of modern high-performance computing systems. However, PFSs do not work well for small requests, especially small random requests. Newer Solid State Drives (SSD) have excellent performance on small random data accesses, but also incur a high monetary cost. In this study, we propose SLA-Cache, a Selective and Layout-Aware Cache system that employs a small set of SSD-based file servers as a cache of conventional HDD-based file servers. SLA-Cache uses a novel scheme to identify performance-critical data, and conducts a selective cache admission (SCA) policy to fully utilize SSD-based file servers. Moreover, since data layout of the cache system can also largely influence its access performance, SLA-Cache applies a layout-aware cache placement scheme (LCP) to store data on SSD-based file servers. By storing data with an optimal layout requiring the lowest access cost among three typical layout candidates, LCP can further improve system performance. We have implemented SLA-Cache under the MPICH2 I/O library. Experimental results show that SLA-Cache can significantly improve I/O throughput, and is a promising approach for parallel applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hybrid parallel file systems (PFS) that combine HDD servers with SSD servers provide a promising solution for data intensive applications. The efficiency of a hybrid PFS relies on the data layout schemes. However, most current layout strategies are designed for homogeneous servers, which neither address the heterogeneity of servers nor the varying access patterns of applications. In this paper, we propose HAS, a novel heterogeneity-aware selective data layout scheme for hybrid PFSs. HAS alleviates inter-server load imbalance through skewing data distribution on heterogeneous servers based on their storage performance. Furthermore, to obtain the optimal performance for a specific access pattern, HAS selects one static data layout policy with lowest access cost from three typical layout candidates as the final file data layout method. To adapt to the mixed access patterns within an application, HAS uses a dynamic data layout scheme, which stores file with multiple copies, each using a different data layout policy, and then selects the copy with the lowest access cost to serve file requests. We have implemented HAS within MPICH2 and OrangeFS. Experimental results show that HAS can significantly increase the I/O throughput of hybrid PFSs, compared to existing data layout optimization methods. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The state-of-the-art storage architecture of high-performance computing systems was designed decades ago, and with today's scale and level of concurrency, it is showing significant limitations. Our recent work proposed a new architecture to address the I/O bottleneck of the conventional wisdom, and the system prototype (FusionFS) demonstrated its effectiveness on up to 16 K nodes—the scale on par with today's largest supercomputers. The main objective of this paper is to investigate FusionFS's scalability towards exascale. Exascale computers are predicted to emerge by 2018, comprising millions of cores and billions of threads. We built an event-driven simulator (FusionSim) according to the FusionFS architecture, and validated it with FusionFS's traces. FusionSim introduced less than 4 percent error between its simulation results and FusionFS traces. With FusionSim we simulated workloads on up to two million nodes and find out almost linear scalability of I/O performance; results justified FusionFS's viability for exascale systems. In addition to the simulation work, this paper extends the FusionFS system prototype in the following perspectives: (1) the fault tolerance of file metadata is supported, (2) the limitations of the current system design is discussed, and (3) a more thorough performance evaluation is conducted, such as N-to-1 metadata write, system efficiency, and more platforms such as Amazon Cloud. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]