Experiences Applying Data Staging Technology in Unconventional Ways

Several efforts have shown the potential of using additional compute-area resources to enhance the IO path to storage. Efforts like data staging, IO forwarding, and similar techniques can accelerate IO performance and reduce the impact of IO time to a compute application. Hybrid staging enhanced this path by adding processing functionality to locations along the data path to storage. While these efforts have been effective, they have taken a somewhat limited view of the potential benefits using some additional compute resources can offer both to enhance a compute application as well as to offering a way to exploit HPC-style resources for non-traditional tasks. Over the last few years, we have been experimenting with the potential for other sorts of activities using a staging style approach to add or enable new functionality. The efforts in this area have yielded a collection of small projects that yield some insights into both the potential and limitations of this approach for both achieving exascale computing and for enabling alternative uses for HPC resources.