The performance gap between computing devices and storage devices is con- tinuously getting larger during the past a few decades. This issue... Show moreThe performance gap between computing devices and storage devices is con- tinuously getting larger during the past a few decades. This issue incurs many I/O problems even in the eld of supercomputing. On one hand, the computing facilities grow very fast as well as the supercomputers are getting more powerful. In addition, the traditional storage devices, such as hard disk drives (HDD) fail to catch up the paces of this growth. On the other hand, applications, from both industries and sciences, are becoming data-intensive, meaning that I/O is highly demanded. Newly emerging non-volatile memory (NVM), such as ash-based solid state drives (SSD), becomes popular in both consuming and enterprise markets. Datacen- ters and supercomputing centers already glimpse this transition and are getting to deploy SSDs in their I/O systems but SSDs still have monetary problems compared to HDDs. Substantial work has been done using SSDs to accelerate I/O and storage systems. However, to the best of our knowledge, there remain some fundamental questions to be addressed, such as what type of storage con guration is suitable to HDD-SSD heterogeneity. Therefore, in this study, we built a high performance hybrid parallel I/O and storage simulator to simulate these con gurations. We also imple- mented an algorithm to approach an optimal con guration using SSDs under parallel I/O and storage systems. This methodology consists of tracing users' applications, analyzing users' requirements including hardware properties, and generating the con- guration suggestions. The experiments show its delity with the minimal error rate is 2% and practical scalability up to 256 processes. The result of this study can help system designers to either optimize current system or predict larger scale design of parallel systems in the future. M.S. in Computer Science, May 2014 Show less
