Implementation and evaluation of active storage in modern parallel file systems

Active Storage is a technology aimed at reducing the bandwidth requirements of current supercomputing systems, and leveraging the processing power of the storage nodes used by some modern file systems. To achieve both objectives, Active Storage moves certain processing tasks to the storage nodes, near the data they manage. Our proposal for Active Storage has several key features: user-space implementation which facilitates the port to different file systems, analytical model to anticipate the performance of Active Storage with respect to a traditional system, support for striped files and complex-format files such as netCDF, and scientific-friendly programming and run-time environment.