Cooperative High-Performance Storage in the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative

The use and acceptance of new high-performance, parallel computing platforms will be impeded by the absence of an infrastructure capable of supporting orders-of-magnitude improvement in hierarchical storage and high-speed I/O. The distribution of these high- performance platforms and supporting infrastructures across a wide-area network further compounds this problem. We describe an architectural design and phased implementation plan for a distributed, cooperative storage environment (CSE) to achieve the necessary performance, user transparency, site autonomy, communication, and security features needed to support the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI). ASCI is a Department of Energy (DOE) program attempting to apply terascale platforms and problem- solving environments (PSEs) toward real-world computational modeling and simulation problems. The ASCI mission must be carried out through a unified, multi-laboratory effort, and will require highly secure, efficient access to vast amounts of data. The CSE provides a logically simple, geographically distributed, storage infrastructure of semi-autonomous cooperating sites to meet the strategic ASCI PSE goal of high-performance data storage and access at the user desktop.