Pan-European project IO-SEA for Exascale Data and Storage Technologies

A 3-year EuroHPC project IO-SEA, funded by the EU and Irish Government, kicked-off in April 2021. IO-SEA will develop and operationalise next generational data management and storage technologies for Exascale computing, targeting potentially zettabyte sized storage (1000 times exabytes or 1 million times petabytes).

Extreme data has become the centre of computational modelling,  simulations, AI and high-performance data analytics. With computation and HPC systems reaching exascale currently, a key requirement is efficient management and access of extremely high-volume data across different components of storage and HPC systems: cloud, tape storage, magnetic disks, electronic disks and different levels of system memories.

The IO-SEA project focuses on the critical aspect of intelligent placement of extreme volumes of data across the different storage and memory components. This ensures that the right resources among the storage tiers are used and accessed by the data storage nodes as close as possible to the compute nodes, thereby optimising performance, cost and energy at extreme scales of computing and data management.

The IO-SEA consortium is led by CEA (French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission) in which ICHEC works alongside Atos BULL (FR), Juelich Supercomputing Centre (DE), ECMWF (UK), Seagate Systems (UK), IT4Innovations (CZ), KTH Royal Institute of Technology (SE), ParTec AG (DE) and University of Mainz (DE).

The role of ICHEC is spread across multiple tasks focusing on Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) Systems, primarily focussing on connecting tape-based storage with cloud-based storage systems.