ABSTRACT
With current trends moving toward large multicore servers as building blocks for HPC and data centers, storage I/O is becoming an increasing concern for application scaling and performance. The main contributing factors that lead to this landscape are: (a) technology that allows and dictates building large multicore servers; (b) servers that are built as shared memory systems that run a single instance of the operating system for convenience and market size purposes; (c) with the advent of “big data” problems, applications that tend to become more and more data intensive; and (d) fast storage devices that allow such systems to operate at high input/output operations per second (IOPS). Therefore, a major trend for both HPC and data centers is toward using large shared servers as infrastructure components for computation.
