Design and Implementation of the Tianhe-2 Data Storage and Management System

With the convergence of high-performance computing (HPC), big data and artificial intelligence (AI), the HPC community is pushing for “triple use” systems to expedite scientific discoveries. However, supporting these converged applications on HPC systems presents formidable challenges in terms of storage and data management due to the explosive growth of scientific data and the fundamental differences in I/O characteristics among HPC, big data and AI workloads. In this paper, we discuss the driving force behind the converging trend, highlight three data management challenges, and summarize our efforts in addressing these data management challenges on a typical HPC system at the parallel file system, data management middleware, and user application levels. As HPC systems are approaching the border of exascale computing, this paper sheds light on how to enable application-driven data management as a preliminary step toward the deep convergence of exascale computing ecosystems, big data, and AI.