Researcher helping storage keep up with HPC

Ali Butt, an assistant professor of computer science in Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering , has received a $400,000 NSF award to further his work on better synching up computing power and storage technology in high-performance computing environments. The challenge is that with growing amounts of data being processed, storage systems are hard pressed to keep pace. Butt says in a statement: “In terms of high-performance computing power, we are seeing systems with tens-of-thousands or more processors that reach terabyte speeds. Soon computing systems will have the capability of processing a petabyte—or 1,000 terabytes—per second. Unfortunately, this is not matched by a corresponding improvement in the input/output systems that enable the processors to interact with external devices, such as disks and networks.”