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neCODEC: nearline data compression for scientific applications

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Abstract

Advances on multicore technologies lead to processors with tens and soon hundreds of cores in a single socket, resulting in an ever growing gap between computing power and available memory and I/O bandwidths for data handling. It would be beneficial if some of the computing power can be transformed into gains of I/O efficiency, thereby reducing this speed disparity between computing and I/O. In this paper, we design and implement a NEarline data COmpression and DECompression (neCODEC) scheme for data-intensive parallel applications. Several salient techniques are introduced in neCODEC, including asynchronous compression threads, elastic file representation, distributed metadata handling, and balanced subfile distribution. Our performance evaluation indicates that neCODEC can improve the performance of a variety of data-intensive microbenchmarks and scientific applications. Particularly, neCODEC is capable of increasing the effective bandwidth of S3D, a combustion simulation code, by more than 5 times.

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Acknowledgements

This work is funded in part by National Science Foundation awards CNS-0917137 and CNS-1059376. This research is sponsored in part by the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research; U.S. Department of Energy. This research is conducted with high performance computational resources provided by the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (http://www.loni.org). We are very grateful for the technical support from the LONI team.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Auburn University, Auburn University, AL, 36849, USA

    Yuan Tian, Cong Xu, Weikuan Yu & Saad Biaz

  2. Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, 37831, USA

    Jeffrey S. Vetter & Scott Klasky

  3. High Performance Computing, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, 70808, USA

    Honggao Liu

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  1. Yuan Tian
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  2. Cong Xu
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Correspondence to Weikuan Yu.

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Tian, Y., Xu, C., Yu, W. et al. neCODEC: nearline data compression for scientific applications. Cluster Comput 17, 475–486 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-013-0265-8

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