CLARISSE: A Run-time Middleware for Coordinating Data Staging on Large Scale HPC Platforms

Currently, the I/O software stack of high-performance computing platforms consists of independently developed layers (scientific libraries, middlewares, I/O forwarding, parallel file systems), lacking global coordination mechanisms. This uncoordinated development model negatively impacts the performance of both independent and ensembles of applications relying on the I/O stack for data access. This talk will present CLARISSE, a middleware designed to enhance data-staging coordination and control in the HPC software storage I/O stack. CLARISSE exposes the parallel data flows to a higher-level hierarchy of controllers, thereby opening up the possibility of developing novel cross-layer optimizations, based on the run-time information. To the best of our knowledge, CLARISSE is the first middleware that decouples the policy, control, and data layers of the software I/O stack in order to simplify the task of globally coordinating the data staging on large-scale HPC platforms. To demonstrate how CLARISSE can be used for performance enhancement, we present two case studies: an elastic load-aware collective I/O and a cross-application parallel I/O scheduling policy.

About the Speaker

Florin Isaila is an Associate Professor in the University Carlos III of Madrid (Spain). He is currently visiting scholar at Argonne National Laboratory (USA) in the MCS Division (2013-2015) as a Marie Curie fellow. He received a PhD in Computer Science from University of Karlsruhe (Germany) in 2004 and a MS from Rutgers The State University of New Jersey in 2000. He has been a visiting scholar at Argonne National Laboratory (2007-2008) and at Northwestern University (2006). His primary research interests include high-performance computing, parallel I/O, storage systems, and distributed systems. He has published over 50 papers in peer-reviewed international journals and conference proceedings.