DATE: Thursday, September 2, 2004
TIME: Noon - 1 pm
PLACE: Hamerschlag Hall D-210

SPEAKER:
Lee Ward
Sandia National Labs

TITLE:
SYSIO: A user-level VFS implementation for the Sandia/Cray Red Storm architecture

ABSTRACT:
Light weight compute node operating systems for very high-end computing architectures such as the Sandia/Cray Red Storm and IBM BG/L designs would discourage, or even preclude, direct support by the operating system of a file system for use by the application. However, the appearance and increasing availability of network attached secure disk protocols introduces the option of addressing this need directly within and by the application.

This talk will motivate and describe the design and implementation of a POSIX-like virtual file system framework component that enables such solutions completely within the user address space, for Red Storm at least, called SYSIO. As well, the SYSIO solutions to some of the unique scalability problems within the file system that are inherent to such machines, such as boot-time access to volumes and judicious use of the
wire during path traversal will be described.

BIO:
Lee Ward is a principal member of technical staff in the scalable systems computing department at Sandia National Laboratories. As an inveterate student of operating systems and file systems, his interests have provided the opportunity to make contributions in high performance, parallel file systems, IO libraries, hierarchical storage management and compute cluster integration/management systems.

SDI / LCS Seminar Questions?
Karen Lindenfelser, 86716, or visit www.pdl.cmu.edu/SDI/