DOSAS: Mitigating the Resource Contention in Active Storage Systems

Active storage provides an effective method to mitigate the I/O bottleneck problem of data intensive high performance computing applications. It can reduce the amount of data transferred as the application runs by moving appropriate computations close to the data. Prior research has achieved considerable progress in developing several active storage prototypes. However, existing studies have neglected the impact of resource contention when concurrent processes request IOoperations from the same storage node simultaneously, which happens frequently in practice. In this paper, we analyze the impact of resource contention on active storage systems. Motivated by our analysis, we propose a novel Dynamic Operation Scheduling Active Storage architecture to address the resource contention issue. It offloads the active processing operations dynamically between storage nodes and compute nodes according to the system environment. By evaluating our architecture, we observed that: (1) resource contention is a critical problem for active storage systems, (2) the proposed dynamic operation scheduling method mitigates the problem, and (3) the new active storage architecture outperforms existing active storage systems.