ABSTRACT
Emerging storage class memories offer a set of challenges and opportunities in system architecture, programming models, and application design. We are exploring the close integration of emerging solid-state storage technologies in conjunction with high performance networks and integrated processing capability. Specifically, we consider the extension of the Blue Gene/Q architecture by integrating Flash into the node to enable a scalable, data-centric computing platform. We are using BG/Q as a rapid prototyping platform allowing us to build a research system based on an infrastructure with proven scalability to thousands of nodes. Our work also involves enabling a Linux environment with standard network interfaces on the BG/Q hardware. We plan to explore applications of this system architecture including existing file systems and middleware as well as more aggressive compute-in-storage approaches. Compute-in-storage is intended to enable the use of high performance (HPC) programming techniques (MPI) to implement data-centric algorithms (e.g. sort, join, graph) that execute on processing elements embedded within a storage system. This presentation will review the architectural extension to BG/Q, present a progress report on the project, and describe some early results.

BIOGRAPHY
Blake G. Fitch first joined the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in 1985 as a student. He received his bachelor"s degree in Computer Science from Antioch College in 1987. From 1987 until present, he has remained with IBM to pursue interests in distributed and parallel systems. In 1990 he joined the Scalable Parallel Systems group, contributing to the research and development that culminated in the IBM scalable parallel system (SP) product. Since then, his research interests have focused on application frameworks and programming models suitable for production parallel computing environments. Practical application of this work includes contributions to the transputer based control system for IBM"s CMOS S/390 mainframes (IBM Boeblingen, Germany 1994) and the architecture of IBM"s Automatic Fingerprint Identification System parallel application (IBM Hursley, UK, 1996). In 1999, he joined the Blue Gene Project as the application architect for BlueMatter, a scalable classical molecular dynamics package. Mr. Fitch is currently a Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM Research and is the architect and technical lead for the Active Storage project. The Active Storage project aims to integrate non-volatile memory into highly scalable parallel system architectures(currently IBM Blue Gene/Q) and to explore system software and applications that leverage the new capabilities of such systems.

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