SAGE2: Hierarchical Object Stores for Exascale

Following the successful completion of the EU-funded SAGE project, development efforts towards novel HPC storage architectures are continuing within the SAGE2 project. Known bottlenecks of today’s storage archi-tectures will make it difficult to realize the targeted 50- to 100-fold performance improvement needed to progress towards exascale. Storage architectures need to become hierarchical in order to provide both high performance and large capacity. Furthermore, they need to be based on object stores overcoming the scalability limitations associated with POSIX file systems.

SAGE addressed these key challenges and demonstrated the benefits and usability of the object store Mero and its capabilities in managing multiple storage tiers. The storage tiers integrated in the SAGE prototype were based on disks and non-volatile memory (NVM) devices with different performance characteristics. In the three-year SAGE2 project, further efforts are planned to support new NVM solutions. While SAGE considered storage and compute as separate subsystems, SAGE2 will enable the usage of compute node local storage resources and thus progress towards tighter integration of these subsystems. The most important new aspect of the SAGE2 project is the support of the Arm ecosystem. Arm-based processors are expected to play an increasingly important role in (European) supercomputing.

The project consortium, with members from four European countries, continues to be led by Seagate. The other industrial players involved in SAGE2 are Arm and Atos-Bull. Furthermore, several universities and research labs are involved, including CEA (France), KTH (Sweden), FZJ (Germany), and the University of Edinburgh (UK). Finally, the SME Kitware is also involved, thus adding visualization as a topic to the project. For further information, visit http://www.sagestorage.eu.

Contact: Prof. Dirk Pleiter, d.pleiter@fz-juelich.de

from JSC News No. 261, 24 October 2018