DEFIO: A Software Defined Storage Network Architecture in HPC Environments

High performance computing (HPC) has witnessed a great boom of computing capability in recent years, however storage capacity fails to keep pace with that rapid growth, coun-teracting the benefits brought by higher computing power. Two dominating bottlenecks have been pointed out: firstly, Small-size IO requests fail to leverage the advantage of current distributed file systems and non-contiguous I/O access pattern induces more movement of disk heads. Secondly, coexistence of multi-tenant applications makes bandwidth guarantee more urgent while unfortunately, more complex. This article proposes a software defined storage network in HPC environments called DEFIO, providing a solution to reduce the adverse effect imposed by the above two bottlenecks, under the proposed architecture we estab-lish several key technologies to solve performance and scalability issues in HPC storage networks.