Final Report

Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) is a junior partner in the project titled Common HEC I/O Forwarding Scalability Layer. The goal of this project is to design and implement an open platform for scalable I/O forwarding for the next generation leadership class machines. These machines are going to be made up of hundreds of thousands of nodes, and current distributed file system architectures cannot scale to such large number of clients due to problems caused by large fan-in. One solution to that problem is to add another layer of machines between the file servers and the clients, which can intermediate the I/O requests. Not only does it reduce the fan-in problem at the file servers, but this additional layer of indirection also allows architectural flexibility, like the ability to support heterogeneous networks and file systems