Collaborative Research: Programming Models and Storage System for High Performance Computation with Many-Core Processors

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A major challenge for future High End Computing (HEC) systems built using many-core chips is the storage system since the available memory and bandwidth per processor core is starting to decline at an alarming rate, with the rapid increase in the number of cores per chip. Data-intensive applications that require large data sets and/or high input-output bandwidth will be especially vulnerable to these trends. Historically, the storage architecture of an HEC system has been constrained to a large degree by the filesystem interfaces in the underlying Operating System (OS). The specific focus of this research is on exploring a new storage model based on write-once tree structures. This research will explore three programming models for users of the storage system, all of which can inter-operate through shared persistent data: 1) a declarative programming model in which any data structure can be directly made persistent in the storage system, with no programmer intervention, 2) a strongly-typed imperative programming model in which a type system extension will be used to enforce a separation between data structures that can be directly made persistent and those that cannot, and 3) a weakly-typed runtime interface that enables low-level C programs to access the storage system.