Microsoft HPC guru Glenn K. Lockwood attended SC22 and provided a great overview of the event. Although perhaps a bit underwhelmed by exascale, quantum, and composability, there was still a lot to see, notably cloud HPC, DAOS, and of course his specialty, I/O. We are especially interested in DAOS, since Intel’s cancellation of Optane made many wonder where that technology would go. It seems that DAOS will not only live on (with NAND flash) but continues to gain momentum from some of the biggest cloud and supercomputing users!
The most surprising observation of the tutorial is how many attendees aren’t using MPI anymore. We got a lot of questions last year about task-oriented I/O, and this year had some great questions about trying to understand or tune the I/O performed by Python-based analytics frameworks. We decided to add support for Darshan to profile non-MPI applications back in 2019 which is now paying dividends by ensuring it is a relevant tool for these new analytics and AI workloads, and we’ll probably have to give more attention to optimizing these workloads’ I/O in the future.
Read Glenn’s entire article on his blog: SC’22 Recap
