The case for a versatile storage system

Storage systems in emerging large-scale (a.k.a. peta-scale) computing systems often introduce a performance or scalability bottleneck. To deal with these limitations we propose a new operational approach: versatile storage, an application-optimized and highly configurable storage system that harnesses node-local resources, is configured and deployed at application deployment time, and has a lifetime dependent on the application lifetime. Our prototype evaluation, using synthetic and application-level benchmarks, on a small cluster as well as on a 96K processor machine, provides evidence that the versatile storage approach can bring valuable benefits to large scale deployments in terms of storage system performance and scalability.