Multi-Tier Cached I/O Architecture for Supercomputers

Recent advances in storage technologies and high performance interconnects have made possible in the last years to build, more and more potent storage systems that serve thousands of nodes. Additionally, the hierarchical organization of current Petascale systems and of the envisioned Exascale platforms contributes to an increase of the I/O subsystem latency. In this dissertation we present a novel generic parallel I/O architecture for clusters and supercomputers. Our design is aimed at large-scale parallel architectures with thousands of compute nodes. Besides acting as middleware for existing parallel file systems, our architecture provides on-line virtualization of storage resources. Another objective of this thesis is to factor out the common parallel I/O functionality from clusters and supercomputers in generic modules in order to facilitate porting of scientific applications across these platforms.