Flexible I/O Support for Reconfigurable Grid Environments

With growing computational power of current supercomputers, scientific computing applications can work on larger problems. The corresponding increase in dataset size is often correlated to an increase in needed storage for the results. Current storage area networks (

san

s) balance

i/o

load on multiple disks using high speed networks, but are integrated on the operating system level, demanding administrative intervention if the usage topology changes. While this is practical for single sites or fairly static grid environments, it is hard to extend to a user defined per-job basis. Reconfigurable grid environments, where computing and storage resources are coupled on a per-job basis, need a more flexible approach for parallel

i/o

on remote locations.

This paper gives a detailed overview of the abilities of the transparent remote access provided by

tunnelfs

, a part of the

viola

parallel

i/o

project. We show how

tunnelfs

manages flexible and transparent access to remote

i/o

resources in a reconfigurable grid environment, supporting the definition of the amount and location of persistent storage services on a per-job basis.