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At least 19 records
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2024

Collection of Disk Failure Events from Alpine, the Parallel File System for Summit Supercomputer

This dataset contains disk (HDD) failure events collected from the Alpine storage system of the Summit supercomputer, hosted at OLCF, spanning from January 4, 2019, to December 21, 2023 (a total of 4 years, 11 months, and 18 days), covering 89% of its operational lifetime. It includes 3,766 disk failure events, each recorded with its detection timestamp (in ISO 8601 format) and detailed by its location within the storage system - rack, enclosure, and drive slot number.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2025

Leveraging Pre-Built Catalogs and Object-Level Scheduling to Eliminate I/O Bottlenecks in HPC Environments

Modern High-Performance Computing (HPC) environments face mounting challenges due to the shift from large to small file datasets, along with an increasing number of users and parallelized applications. As HPC systems rely on Parallel File Systems (PFS), such as Lustre for data processing, performance bottlenecks stemming from Object Storage Target (OST) contention have become a significant concern. Existing solutions, such as LADS with its object-level scheduling approach, fall short in large-scale HPC environments due to their inability to effectively address metadata I/O bottlenecks and the growing number of I/O processes. This study highlights the pressing need for a comprehensive solution that tackles both OST contention and metadata I/O challenges in diverse HPC workloads. To address these challenges, we propose SwiftLoad, an object-level I/O scheduling framework that leverages a metadata catalog to enhance the performance and efficiency of parallel HPC utilities. The adoption of the metadata catalog mitigates the metadata I/O bottlenecks that commonly occur in HPC utilities, a challenge that is particularly pronounced in object-level I/O scheduling. SwiftLoad addresses OST contention and the uneven distribution of I/O processes across different OSTs through mathematical modeling and incorporates a Loader Configuration Module to regulate the number of I/O processes. Evaluated with two representative utilities—data deduplication profiling and data augmentation—SwiftLoad achieved performance improvements of up to 5.63x and 11.0x, respectively, on a production supercomputer.

HPC↗
DOE OSTI2025

Toward a persistent event-streaming system for high-performance computing applications

High-performance computing (HPC) applications have traditionally relied on parallel file systems and file transfer services to manage data movement and storage. Alternative approaches have been proposed that use direct communications between application components, trading persistence and fault tolerance for speed. Event-driven architectures, as popularized in enterprise contexts, present a compelling middle ground, avoiding the performance cost and API constraints of parallel file systems while retaining persistence and offering impedance matching between application components. However, adapting streaming frameworks to HPC workloads requires addressing challenges unique to HPC systems. This paper investigates the potential for a streaming framework designed for HPC infrastructures and use cases. We introduce Mofka, a persistent event-streaming framework designed specifically for HPC environments. Mofka combines the capabilities of a traditional streaming service with optimizations tailored to the HPC context, such as support for massively multicore nodes, efficient scaling for large producer-consumer workflows, RDMA-enabled high-performance network communications, specialized network fabrics with multiple links per node, and efficient handling of large scientific data payloads. Built using the Mochi suite of HPC data service components, Mofka provides a lightweight, modular, and high-performance solution for persistent streaming in HPC systems. We present the architecture of Mofka and evaluate its performance against Kafka and Redpanda using benchmarks on diverse platforms, including Argonne's Polaris and Oak Ridge's Frontier supercomputers, showing up to 8× improvement in throughput in some scenarios. We then demonstrate its utility in several real-world applications: a tomographic reconstruction pipeline, a workflow for the discovery of metal-organic frameworks for carbon capture, and the instrumentation of Dask workflows for provenance tracking and performance analysis.

HPC↗
DOE OSTI2026

FitCache: A Transparent Drop-In Framework for Multi-Tier Caching to Accelerate Distributed Deep Learning Workloads

Training in Deep learning (DL) remains highly compute- and data-intensive, with I/O becoming a critical bottleneck as models and datasets scale. Recent studies report that data loading can dominate training time, especially on large-scale HPC systems with shared parallel file systems (PFS). Existing caching approaches either rely on single-tier designs or require intrusive modifications to training pipelines, limiting their portability and effectiveness. In this work, we present FitCache, a transparent drop-in framework for multi-tier caching to accelerate distributed DL training by coordinating fast local memory (e.g., DRAM, Persistent Memory (PMem)) and NVMe as hierarchical caches atop PFS. Our design adapts to hardware diversity, i.e., if NVMe is missing, memory transparently acts as a caching tier, ensuring stable performance. FitCache transparently intercepts I/O requests and issues concurrent fetches across all tiers, returning data from the fastest responder without centralized metadata or static redirection paths. FitCache adapts to dynamic workloads and heterogeneous clusters while maintaining POSIX compatibility. Experiments on Frontier (2048 GPUs) and smaller research clusters show that FitCache reduces training time by up to 40% and per-batch I/O latency by up to 71.6% compared to Lustre Orion PFS, offering a drop-in solution for scalable DL training.

Hu, Guangxing [ORNL] (ORCID:0009000283203614)↗
DOE OSTI2024

VerifyIO: Ensuring Correctness of Consistency Semantics in Parallel I/O

Abstract—High-performance computing (HPC) applications generate and consume substantial amounts of data, typically managed by parallel file systems. These applications access file systems either through the POSIX interface or by using highlevel I/O libraries. While the POSIX consistency model remains dominant in HPC, emerging file systems and popular I/O libraries increasingly adopt alternative consistency models that relax semantics in various ways, creating significant challenges for correctness and portability. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing a trace-driven I/O consistency verification workflow, implemented in our open-source tool, VerifyIO, which collects execution traces, detects data conflicts, and verifies proper synchronization against specified consistency models. Our extensive evaluation of 91 test case executions across three widely used I/O libraries with four I/O consistency models reveals critical consistency issues at both application and implementation levels.

Consistency Semantics↗
DOE OSTI2026

Level-2 Milestone 9009: Flux and Rabbit Capabilities on El Capitan

This document is the milestone delivery report for the ASC 2025 L2 milestone (See Table 1) for advanced I/O capabilities for El Capitan via Flux Workload Manager support and the new I/O hardware designed for El Capitan, the Rabbit Storage System. In this document we describe the design of the Rabbit Storage System and how it is managed by Flux. We evaluate the performance and usability of Rabbit using ARES, IOR, and an AI inference workload. Overall, we find that Rabbit shows good scalability, especially in node-local storage configurations, and is more scalable than the global Lustre parallel file system.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2025

Optimizing Management of Persistent Data Structures in High-Performance Analytics

Large-scale data analytics workflows ingest massive input data into various data structures, including graphs and key-value datastores. These data structures undergo multiple transformations and computations and are typically reused in incremental and iterative analytics workflows. Persisting in-memory views of these data structures enables reusing them beyond the scope of a single program run while avoiding repetitive raw data ingestion overheads. Memory-mapped I/O enables persisting in-memory data structures without data serialization and deserialization overheads. However, memory-mapped I/O lacks the key feature of persisting consistent snapshots of these data structures for incremental ingestion and processing. The obstacles to efficient virtual memory snapshots using memory-mapped I/O include background writebacks outside the application’s control, and the significantly high storage footprint of such snapshots. To address these limitations, we present Privateer, a memory and storage management tool that enables storage-efficient virtual memory snapshotting while also optimizing snapshot I/O performance. Here, we integrated Privateer into Metall, a state-of-the-art persistent memory allocator for C++, and the Lightning Memory-Mapped Database (LMDB), a widely-used key-value datastore in data analytics and machine learning. Privateer optimized application performance by 1.22× when storing data structure snapshots to node-local storage, and up to 16.7× when storing snapshots to a parallel file system. Privateer also optimizes storage efficiency of incremental data structure snapshots by up to 11× using data deduplication and compression.

Computer science↗
DOE OSTI2024

Disk Failure Dataset from the Campaign Storage System

This dataset consists of 1,389 disk (HDD) failure events collected from the Campaign storage system at LANL. The Campaign system supported various compute platforms throughout its lifespan, including Cielo, Fire, Ice, and notably, the Trinity supercomputer. Each recorded event includes its detection timestamp (in ISO 8601 format) and details such as its location within the storage system—rack, enclosure, and drive slot number. The data, spanning from May 4, 2021, to July 25, 2023 (2 years, 2 months, and 22 days), represents failure events from the terminal years of Campaign's operational period, accounting for 26% of its total operational time.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2025

I/O in Machine Learning Applications on HPC Systems: A 360-degree Survey

Growing interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has resulted in a surge in demand for faster methods of Machine Learning (ML) model training and inference. This demand for speed has prompted the use of high performance computing (HPC) systems that excel in managing distributed workloads. Because data is the main fuel for AI applications, the performance of the storage and I/O subsystem of HPC systems is critical. In the past, HPC applications accessed large portions of data written by simulations or experiments or ingested data for visualizations or analysis tasks. ML workloads perform small reads spread across a large number of random files. This shift of I/O access patterns poses several challenges to modern parallel storage systems. In this paper, we survey I/O in ML applications on HPC systems, and target literature within a 6-year time window from 2019 to 2024. We define the scope of the survey, provide an overview of the common phases of ML, review available profilers and benchmarks, examine the I/O patterns encountered during offline data preparation, training, and inference, and explore I/O optimizations utilized in modern ML frameworks and proposed in recent literature. Lastly, we seek to expose research gaps that could spawn further R&D.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2025

HDF5 in the exascale era: Delivering efficient and scalable parallel I/O for exascale applications

Accurately modeling real-world systems requires scientific applications at exascale to generate massive amounts of data and manage data storage efficiently. However, parallel input and output (I/O) faces challenges due to new application workflows and the state-of-the-art memory, interconnect, and storage architectures considered in exascale designs. The storage hierarchy has expanded with node-local persistent memory, solid-state storage, and traditional disk and tape-based storage, thus requiring efficiency at each layer and much more efficient data movement among these layers. This paper discusses how the ExaHDF5 project improved the I/O performance and data management for exascale architectures by enhancing HDF5, a widely used parallel I/O library. The team developed an Asynchronous I/O Virtual Object Layer (VOL) connector that allowed overlapping I/O with computation. They also created a Cache VOL to complement asynchronous I/O by incorporating fast storage layers, such as burst buffer and node-local storage, into the parallel I/O workflow through caching and staging data. Additionally, the team enabled data aggregation and I/O at the node level by using a Subfiling Virtual File Driver (VFD). To demonstrate superior I/O performance with HDF5 at exascale, the ExaHDF5 team collaborated with several exascale applications. In this paper, we show I/O performance improvements for three applications: Cabana (a particle-based simulation library), EQSIM (a regional earthquake simulation software), and E3SM (a climate system modeling library).

Asynchronous I/Ol↗
DOE OSTI2024

Enabling Low-Overhead HT-HPC Workflows at Extreme Scale using GNU Parallel

GNU Parallel is a versatile and powerful tool for process parallelization widely used in scientific computing. This paper demonstrates its effective application in high-performance computing (HPC) environments, particularly focusing on its scalability and efficiency in executing large-scale high-throughput high-performance computing (HT-HPC) workflows. Through real-world examples, we highlight GNU Parallel’s performance across various HPC workloads, including GPU computing, container-based workloads, and node-local NVMe storage. Our results on two leading supercomputers, OLCF’s Frontier and NERSC’s Perlmutter, showcase GNU Parallel’s rapid process dispatching ability and its capacity to maintain low overhead even at extreme scales. We explore GNU Parallel’s application in massive parallel file transfers using a scheduled Data Transfer Node (DTN) cluster, emphasizing its broad utility in diverse scientific workflows. Beyond its direct application as a viable workflow manager, GNU Parallel can be employed in conjunction with other workflow systems as a "last-mile" parallelizing driver and as a quick prototyping tool to design and extract parallel profiles from application executions. We then argue that the potential for GNU Parallel to transform workflow management at extreme scales is substantial, paving the way for more efficient and effective scientific discoveries.

Maheshwari, Ketan↗
DOE OSTI2024

Climate Model Output Rewriter

The Climate Model Output Rewriter (CMOR) software was first developed by LLNL’s PCMDI program in early 2000s and was formally released with v1.0 (July 2006), v2.0 (January 2011), and v3.1(June 2016). CMOR is used to produce Climate and Forecast Convention (http://cfconventions.org/) CF-compliant netCDF files, in the standard format required to satisfy the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP). The software has been used across multiple phases of the Earth System Modeling (ESM) project CMIP (CMIP3, CMIP5, CMIP6, and planned use in CMIP7) along with numerous parallel projects focused on preparation observations for use in model evaluation (obs4MIPs) and forcing datasets (input4MIPs) to guide ESM simulations to meet strict experimental protocols. More information can be obtained from the CMOR website and code repositories: https://cmor.llnl.gov/; https://github.com/pcmdi/cmor; https://github.com/PCMDI/cmor3_documentation The ESM variable definitions used as input for CMOR can also be viewed in code repositories: https://github.com/PCMDI/cmip3-cmor-tables/; https://github.com/PCMDI/cmip5-cmor-tables/; https://github.com/PCMDI/cmip6-cmor-tables/

Mauzey, ChristopherF↗
DOE OSTI2025

Improvements to MOOSE user workflow through polyhedral elements, automation, and concise physics syntax

The MOOSE framework is a foundational capability used by the NEAMS program to create over 15 different simulation tools for advanced nuclear reactors. Due to MOOSE's broad use, improvements to the framework in support of modeling and simulation goals are critical to the program. Such improvements can take many forms, including optimization, improved user experience, streamlined application programming interfaces (APIs), parallelism, and new capabilities. The work described in this report was conducted in direct support of NEAMS tools and includes: addition of support for polyhedral elements, incorporation of mesh smoothers for mesh repair, integration of the Physics and ActionComponents systems, expansion of the Convergence system, and exploration of automated input file generation. These five areas of development are fundamental capabilities that will be leveraged by many NEAMS applications.

97 - MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2026

PRISMA: PARALLEL REFINEMENT AND INTEGRATION SYSTEM FOR MULTI-AZIMUTHAL ANALYSIS

The Parallel Refinement and Integration System for Multi-azimuthal Analysis (PRISMA, version 1.1.0) is a Python application for processing X-ray diffraction (XRD) image data. PRISMA wraps GSAS-II to perform azimuthally-binned peak refinement, computes per-frame strain and d-spacing from those fits, and provides three PyQt5 graphical interfaces: (1) a Recipe Builder for selecting GSAS-II control (.imctrl) files, optional mask (.immask) files or threshold-ased masking, reference and experiment image sets, peaks, zimuthal range and bin size, and an optional ceria-based auto-calibration; (2) a Batch Processor that uses Dask on local workstations and pure MPI (mpi4py.futures.MPICommExecutor) on HPC to distribute GSAS-II refinement across cores or compute nodes and write results to a 4-dimensional (peaks x frames x azimuths x measurements) Zarr dataset; and (3) a Data Analyzer that renders heatmaps of fit parameters, strain, frame-to-frame deltas, and percent-change-vs-reference, and exports user-defined subsections to CSV or Excel. The peak-refinement algorithm is deterministic. Benchmark on ALCF Crux: a 20,000-image set, single-peak fit in frame mode with 44 azimuthal bins on 128 nodes x 128 workers, 48 seconds total wall time.

Lorenzo Martin, Maria De La Cinta [Argonne Nationa↗
DOE OSTI2026

A scalable framework for efficient coupling of thermal and microstructural simulations in additive manufacturing

Predicting microstructure evolution in metal additive manufacturing (AM) is important for process optimization, but spatiotemporal scale disparities between thermal transport and microstructure evolution create significant challenges for efficient data transfer between simulation codes. To address this, we present Stork, a scalable framework for coupling thermal and microstructural simulations. Stork uses a sparse data representation to identify and store active solidification sub-volumes, enabling highly parallel quad-linear interpolation from coarse thermal grids to fine microstructure grids without large intermediate storage. We demonstrate the framework by coupling the semi-analytic heat transfer code 3DThesis with the time-parallel cellular automata code Toucan. This approach achieves over two orders of magnitude reduction in data generation time and file size compared to prior workflows. Numerical studies show that quad-linear interpolation preserves grain morphology and crystallographic texture in laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) simulations for coarsening ratios up to 16. Overall, Stork provides a scalable pathway for high-throughput, component-scale AM simulations on modern high-performance computing systems.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2025

Data for Roebuck et al. (2025), "Differences in dissolved organic matter composition between rivers and estuaries is conserved across freshwater and saltwater coastal regions"

Dissolved organic matter (DOM) in coastal surface waters influences local water quality and is an important component of biogeochemical cycling in coastal systems, but the processes that alter DOM composition along lower reaches of rivers and estuarine waters are poorly understood. Roebuck et al. (2025) leveraged a spatially distributed community sampling effort in coastal ecosystems across two regions to identify broad spatial drivers of surface water DOM composition and identify transferable trends between saltwater and freshwater coastal systems. Samples were collected by community members from 47 locations within the mid-Atlantic and Great Lakes coastal regions.This dataset includes:* A selection of commonly reported absorbance and fluorescence peaks normalized to dissolved organic carbon concentrations* Parallel factor output from the EC1 fluorescence datasets* A selection of commonly reported absorbance and fluorescence peaks * Spectral indices output from matlab script for absorbance and fluorescence datasets* CO2sys calculations of pH changes under varying temperatures and a constant salinity, DIC, and alkalinity concentrationAll data files are plain-text CSV (comma separated value) and no special software is required to read them.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗