Storage Services

• Supercomputer (n): A computer which turns a CPU-bound problem into an I/O bound problem. • As high performance computers become faster and more parallel, I/O can often become the bottleneck for large computations: – Checkpoint/restart files – Plot files – Scratch files for out-of-core computations • The explosive growth of storage capacity has made things even more interesting: – Data sets in the 10s to 1000s of gigabytes – Millions of files (a.k.a. “Backup software’s worst nightmare”) – Not all applications lend themselves well to simple read/write access I/O Approaches for Data