Petascale Data Storage Institute

Petascale computing infrastructures for scientific discovery make petascale demands on information storage capacity, performance, concurrency, reliability, availability, and manageability. The last decade has shown that parallel file systems can barely keep pace with high performance computing along these dimensions; this poses a critical challenge when petascale requirements are considered. This proposal describes a Petascale Data Storage Institute (PDSI) that focuses on the data storage problems found in petascale scientific computing environments, with special attention to community issues such as interoperability, community buy-in, and shared tools. Leveraging experience in applications and diverse file and storage systems expertise of its members, the institute allows a group of researchers to collaborate extensively on developing requirements, standards, algorithms, and development and performance tools. Mechanisms for petascale storage and results are made available to the petascale computing community. The institute holds periodic workshops and develops educational materials on petascale data storage for science. The PDSI is a collaboration between researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Sandia National Laboratories, Los Alamos National Laboratory, University of Michigan, and the University of California at Santa Cruz.