IO-SEA aims to provide a novel data management and storage platform for exascale computing based on hierarchical storage management (HSM) and on-demand provisoning of storage services. The platform will efficiently make use of storage tiers spanning NVMe and NVRAM at the top all the way down to tape-based technologies. System requirements are driven by data intensive use-cases, in a very strict co-design approach.

The concept of ephemeral data nodes and data accessors is introduced that allow users to flexibly operate the system, using various well-known data access paradigms, such as POSIX namespaces, S3/Swift Interfaces, MPI-IO and other middleware, data formats and protocols.

These ephemeral resources eliminate the problem of treating storage resources as static and unchanging system components – which is not a tenable proposition for data intensive exascale environments. The methods and techniques are applicable to exascale class data intensive applications and workflows that need to be deployed in highly heterogeneous computing environments.

Within this project JSC is leading the use cases and co-design activities, and contributes to the instrumentation & monitoring as well as the application interface activities.