The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis
The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis
Authors: Jakob Luettgau (Inria), Michael Kuhn (Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg), Kira Duwe (CERN), Gary Grider (Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL)), Garth Gibson (VDURA), Jean-Thomas Acquaviva (Data Direct Networks), Kyle Chard (University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory (ANL)), Nick Brown (Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC))
Abstract: Exponentially growing data volumes present fundamental challenges to manage and access large quantities of data. With a new generation of more flexible hardware and software, computational storage re-emerges as a promising technology to reduce network contention and improve performance for key applications. As industry is converging on a first set of standards, it is up to the HPC community as well as developers and scientists from the different domains to find the use cases and tools necessary. This BoF strives to connect the stakeholders, from application to middleware and hardware developers to explore the potential for HPC and scientific computing.
Long Description: Growing simulation fidelity and an explosion of affordable and high-resolution sensings devices are driving the exponential growth of data handled by HPC systems. Especially the rise of machine learning applications, but also other large-scale data analysis tasks, impose workload patterns on existing storage solutions that lead to large but avoidable data copies and transfers that lead to contention near storage devices and in the network. A promising solution for many workloads that need to aggregate across large volumes of data is computational storage. Instead of moving the raw data to compute nodes, the programs are distributed to storage nodes and devices. While the idea is not new, computational storage poses a co-design challenge that requires bringing together voices from different stakeholders including the application sides, middleware developers as well as hardware designers and vendors.
As applications are becoming easier to decompose, and industry is converging on different industry standards, such as a common device API as proposed by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), it is essential for the HPC community to consider opportunities but also raise challenges and needs to ensure interoperability with applications, workflows, middleware and systems.
The goal of the BoF is to bring together HPC practitioners with large-scale data management and analysis challenges to identify common use cases, raise awareness for current developments, and facilitate opportunities for collaboration across stakeholders with an HPC focus. Topics to be discussed include the state of the art of computational storage hardware and programming paradigms on the one hand, and on the other cover opportunities for the operating side to increase performance but also reduce energy footprints by reducing network transfers or employing data processing accelerators for common workloads.
As this is the first time the BoF will be held, we will invite 4-5 speakers from academia, government labs, and industry to pitch their perspective on the challenges and the opportunities of computational storage in 5-minute short talks and then transition into an open discussion with the plenum. We expect the BoF to draw significant interest, and intend to establish the BoF as an exchange for HPC practitioners interested in computational storage.
Website: https://csx4hpc.github.io/