The NEXTGenIO project addresses a key challenge not only for Exascale, but also for HPC and data intensive computing in general: the challenge of I/O performance.
As core-counts have massively increased over the past few years, the performance of I/O subsystems have struggled to keep up with computational performance and have become a key bottleneck on today’s largest systems. NEXTGenIO will develop a prototype computing platform that uses on-node non-volatile memory, bridging the latency gap between DRAM and disk, thus removing this bottleneck. In addition to the hardware that will be built as part of the project, NEXTGenIO will develop the software stack (from OS and runtime support to programming models and tools) that goes hand-in-hand with this new hardware architecture. Two particular focal points are a data and power aware job scheduling system, as well as an I/O workload and workflow simulator that will allow us to stress-test our hardware and software developments.
We believe that the new platform that is being developed in NEXTGenIO will be capable of delivering transformational performance across high performance and data intensive computing.