High performance I/O architectures and systems

Abstract

I/O- and data-intensive workloads, as represented by the Grand Challenge problems, multimedia applications, cosmology simulations, climate modeling, and large collaborative visualizations, to name a few, entail innovative approaches to alleviate the I/O (both bandwidth and data access) performance bottlenecks. The advent of low-cost hardware platforms, such as the Beowulf clusters, has opened up numerous possibilities in mass data storage, scalable architectures, and large-scale simulations. The objective of this Special Issue is to discuss problems and solutions, to identify new issues, and to help shape future research and development directions in these areas. From these perspectives, the Special Issue addresses the problems encountered at the hardware, middleware, and application levels, providing conceptual as well as empirical treatments.