ai storage

KAUST-CS-Graduate-Seminar-prof-Xiaosong-Ma-Coordination-for-Better-Resource-Sharing-2025.jpg

I/O Coordination for Better Resource Sharing - From HPC to AI Storage

Xiaosong Ma, Department Chair and Professor of Computer Science, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI)

Dec 1, 12:00 - 13:00

B9, Level 2, Room 2325

Despite tremendous improvement in absolute capacity and speed, the storage subsystem remains one of the slower, less predictable, and less scalable components of large-scale applications. In this talk, through a personal journey of parallel and distributed storage systems, I hope to share observations and lessons from these past projects. In particular, across the many layers of the storage hierarchy studied, from the CPU caches to supercomputer and cloud storage clusters, we repeatedly encounter the same underlying challenge of efficient sharing of I/O resources. Without effective regulation of I/O flows, the storage system can easily be a performance bottleneck while remaining largely underutilized. The discussion of solutions continues into related new (and old) storage problems with today's parallel AI training and inference workloads.