ObjectStorage: Scalable Bandwidth for HPC Clusters

This paper describes the Object Storage Architecture solution for cost-effective, high bandwidth storage in High Performance Computing (HPC) environments. An HPC environment requires a storage system to scale to very large sizes and performance without sacrificing cost-effectiveness nor ease of sharing and managing data. Traditional storage solutions, including disk-per-node, Storage-Area Networks (SAN), and Network-Attached Storage (NAS) implementations, fail to find a balance between performance, ease of use, and cost as the storage system scales up. In contrast, building storage systems as specialized storage clusters using commodity-off-the-shelf (COTS) components promise excellent price-performance at scale provided that binding them into a single system image and linking them to HPC compute clusters can be done without introducing bottlenecks or management complexities. While a file interface (typified by NAS systems) at each storage cluster component is too high-level to provide scalable bandwidth and simple management across large numbers of components, and a block interface (typified by SAN systems) is too low-level to avoid synchronization bottlenecks in a shared storage cluster, an object interface (typified by the inode layer of traditional file system implementations) is at the intermediate level needed for independent, highly parallel operation at each storage cluster component under centralized, but infrequently applied, control. The Object Storage Device (OSD