I/O on High-End Computing (HEC) machines is increasingly becoming the killing performance bottleneck. However, conventional execution paradigms for HEC are computing-centric and have inherent limitations in addressing critical I/O issues of data-intensive applications. There is a great need for developing unconventional execution paradigms to meet the growing I/O demand of high-end computing.
In this project, the PIs propose a decoupled execution paradigm (DEP) to address I/O bottleneck issues. DEP is the first paradigm enabling users to identify and handle data-intensive operations separately. The objective of the proposed research is three-fold: 1) understanding the execution paradigm requirement from the data-centric point of view, 2) studying the feasibility of the proposed decoupled execution paradigm, and 3) providing a partially implemented prototyping of DEP and its associated system design to support the first two objectives. Several technical hurdles have been identified, which include system architecture, programming model, and runtime system. Solutions are proposed and detailed plans are provided to evaluate the newly proposed decoupled execution paradigm.
