The IOLanes project

IOLANES (www.iolanes.eu) is a European Union funded research project targeted at understanding and improving the I/O performance in modern hardware that employs multicore architectures by adapting or redesigning the I/O stack.

Since storage systems are perhaps the most critical component of modern computing infrastructures, the proposed work will benefit many I/O-­‐intensive applications that support activities of businesses, organisations, and individuals alike.

Data storage technology today faces many challenges, including performance inefficiencies, inadequate dependability and integrity guarantees, limited scalability, loss of confidentiality, poor resource sharing, and increased ownership and management costs.

IOLanes examines how multicore CPUs can be used to design next generation persistent I/O architectures. The project addresses overheads and scalability issues over multicore CPUs that will allow I/O performance to scale as well as take advantage of additional compute cycles in future multicores. By improving scaling of the I/O stack on modern architectures, the project will result in significant increase in overall I/O efficiency: IOLanes designs I/O subsystems that will be capable of sustaining one order of magnitude more load per storage node than todays’ systems, resulting in a 10x reduction in the number of storage nodes in data centres or a 10x increase in the size of the workload for the same number of storage nodes. Considerable consolidation of resources in data centres and other IT facilities will contribute to more efficient processing of data-­‐centric applications and a greener world.

IOLanes designs and builds a new I/O stack in the Linux kernel that achieves partitioning of shared resources and scales with the number of cores. This stack supports virtualized I/O and offers facilities for transparently using the available cycles in multicore processors for new I/O features. In addition, IOLanes builds a single-­‐point monitoring infrastructure for complex, persistent I/O stacks. The project will demonstrate the benefits of the new design using real life data centre type applications.

In the context of IOLanes the TariffAdvisor system is used for benchmarking the I/O in current architectures as well as the improved architecture. At the same time TariffAdvisor will be integrated with database replication middleware and a streaming engine. The results of IOLanes will improve TariffAdvisor both in terms of performance and flexibility, and will extend its use cases in new deomains.

Apart from Neurcocom, the IOLANES partners are:

  • Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH) -­‐ Coordinator,
  • Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC),
  • University of Madrid (UPM),
  • INTEL Performance Labs Ireland,
  • IBM Research Labs, Haifa

IOLANES is funded by the E.C. under the 7th Framework program and is part of the portfolio of the Embedded Systems Unit -­‐ G3a Directorate General Information Society.