A consortium including ECMWF has announced the successful start of the NEXTGenIO project on input/output challenges in high-performance computing (HPC).
ECMWF is involved in the three-year EU-funded project as part of its Scalability Programme, which aims to prepare its forecasting systems for the massively parallel supercomputing facilities of the future.
NEXTGenIO is coordinated by EPCC, the supercomputing centre at the University of Edinburgh. It seeks to address the strain put on input/output (I/O) systems of high-end HPC systems when too many processors try to communicate with slow disk storage at once.
NEXTGenIO will explore the use of non-volatile memory technologies and associated systemware developments. It will develop a prototype system built around NV-DIMMs by Intel and Fujitsu. An I/O workload simulator will enable a quantitative assessment of performance gains.
The project partners include several vendors, while ECMWF is represented as one of three end-users.
Peter Bauer, the head of ECMWF’s Scalability Programme, said: “The solutions that NEXTGenIO offers will greatly enhance efficiency by implementing a much closer link between computing and data management with novel technology. This will enable ECMWF Member and Co-operating States to benefit from enhanced model configurations without excessive data handling costs.”
A press release published on the NEXTGenIO website gives further details on the project.
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