Feasibility Study of a Future HPC System for Memory Intensive Applications: Conceptual Design of Storage System

We started a feasibility study of high-end computing systems as a 2-year national project in 2012 for exa-scale computing era. In order to realize the exa-scale system, it is extremely important to design a large scale storage system with high bandwidth.We made a conceptual design of a mass storage system with high-speed I/O technology by studying future I/O requirements from simulations for disaster prevention and mitigation research. We concluded that a distributed and parallel file system with multiple meta-data servers is required, because a meta-data server (MDS) using in the Lustre file system is apparently insufficient to handle a large scale file system. In this paper, the storage system architecture and its performance are presented.