BIGDATA: F: DKM: Collaborative Research: PXFS: ParalleX Based Transformative I/O System for Big Data

Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge LA

Investigators

Abstract

Recent decades have seen the development of computational science where modeling and data analysis are critical to exploration, discovery, and refinement of new innovations in science and engineering. More recently the techniques have been applied to arts, social, political and other fields less traditionally reliant on high performance computing. This innovation has grown out of realization some 20 years ago that I/O (input/output) support for high performance parallel and distributed architectures had lagged behind that of pure computational speed, and further that bring I/O up to speed was both critical, and a rather difficult problem. The core hurdle of contemporary I/O on large HPC machines relates to issues of latency in large parts caused by the deficiencies of the historical I/O model that was relevant when computers were exclusively large, centralized, single processor systems shared by many time-sharing programs. In order to improve I/O on scalability on future hardware architectures novel approaches are required. This project is conducting research on an extension of ParalleX, a new highly innovative parallel execution model. The extension provides a powerful I/O interface that allows researchers to create highly efficient data management, discovery, and analysis codes for Big Data applications. This new extension, known as PXFS, is based on HPX, an implementation of ParalleX based on C++, and OrangeFS, a high performance parallel file system. The research goal driving PXFS is to extend HPX objects into I/O space so that the objects become persistent and storage becomes another class of memory, all accessed as a single virtual address space and managed by an event driven dynamic adaptive computation environment. Critical aspects of this approach include futures-based synchronization, dynamic locality management, dynamic resource management, hierarchical name space, and an active global address space (AGAS). The overall goals of PXFS are to eliminate the division of programming imposed by conventional file system through the unification of name spaces and their management, and to minimize global synchronization in order to support asynchronous concurrency. The research methodology is to implement a Map/Reduce application framework using PXFS and evaluate its effectiveness in both performance and ease of use. This project is conducted at three major research universities involving undergraduate and graduate students, post-docs, and high-school teachers and their students. The project includes a PI from the functional genomics field acting as domain science expert in order to focus the development efforts on real world problems. Graduate students and post-docs involved in the project are trained in these areas to promote scientists who understanding both aspects of Big Data problems. The project engages under represented minorities with the goal to inspire them to pursue a career in computer science or genomics. The software developed by the project is available open-source and archived using an integrated source code revision repository, wiki, and bug tracking software system in addition to code releases with accompanying documentation.