
Los Alamos National Laboratory 75
FIGURE 6.5: PLFS N-to-1 application I/O speed-ups. [Image courtesy of John
Bent (LANL).]
6.4 Conclusion
LANL is innovative in its implementation of an HPC infrastructure, as
they are early adopters of parallel file systems, globally shared parallel file
systems, and burst buffers; but this also may lead to future challenges. They
pushed users to use N-to-1 with a lot of self-describing information in their
I/O, and the users have suffered poor performance, but middleware is now
available that makes N-to-1 perform well.
One important part of LANL’s I/O strategy is to be involved in the na-
tional community. Some examples