Unlike traditional I/O designs where data is stored and retrieved by request, a new I/O architecture for High End Computing (HEC) based on a novel "Server-Push" model where a data access server proactively pushes data from a file server to the compute node's memory. The objective of this research is two fold: 1) increasing fundamental understanding of data access delay, 2) producing an effective I/O architecture that minimizes I/O latency. The PIs plan to increase the fundamental understanding through the study of data access pattern identification, prefetching algorithms, data replacement strategy, and extensive experimental testing. The PIs will verify the performance improvement with their file server design for various critical I/O intensive applications by using a combination of simulation and actual implementation in the PVFS2 file system.
