NoaSci: A Numerical Object Array Library for I/O of Scientific Applications on Object Storage

The strong consistency and stateful workflow are seen as the major factors for limiting parallel I/O performance because of the need for locking and state management. While the POSIX-based I/O model dominates modern HPC storage infrastructure, emerging object storage technology can potentially improve I/O performance by eliminating these bottlenecks. Despite a wide deployment on the cloud, its adoption in HPC remains low. We argue one reason is the lack of a suitable programming interface for parallel I/O in scientific applications. In this work, we introduce NoaSci, a Numerical Object Array library for scientific applications. NoaSci supports different data formats (e.g. HDF5, binary), and focuses on supporting node-local burst buffers and object stores. We demonstrate for the first time how scientific applications can perform parallel I/O on Seagate's Motr object store through NoaSci. We evaluate NoaSci's preliminary performance using the iPIC3D space weather application and position against existing I/O methods.