Assessment of the I/O and Storage Subsystem in Modular Supercomputing Architectures

The Modular Supercomputing Architecture (MSA) plays a key role in Europe's Exascale computing strategy. Developed in the European project series DEEP, MSA breaks with traditional HPC architectures by integrating heterogeneous computing resources in a modular way at the system level, organizing them in compute modules with different hardware and performance characteristics. Heterogeneous applications and workflows can be run on exactly matching computing resources, therefore improving the time to solution and energy use. While mapping different code parts on the best-suited compute modules of the DEEP-EST prototype has been evaluated yet, the parallel I/O and storage environment has been neglected. Therefore, this position paper makes a first attempt to provide a complete overview and analysis of the complex I/O subsystem of the DEEP-EST prototype and IO-SEA, the main EU project addressing I/O and data management in MSA systems.