SCS Lab Receives NSF Framework Grant for Hermes Project
The National Science Foundation has awarded a Framework Grant (OAC-1835764) to Dr. Xian-He Sun for the Hermes project, a heterogeneous-aware multi-tiered distributed I/O buffering system designed to address the growing performance gap between computing power and storage systems.
The Hermes Vision
Modern supercomputers face a critical challenge: while computing power continues to grow exponentially, storage system performance lags behind, creating what researchers call the "storage wall." Hermes addresses this fundamental bottleneck by intelligently managing data across multiple storage tiers, from fast memory to traditional disk storage.
The project extends the widely-used HDF Library to support intelligent I/O buffering for deep memory and storage hierarchy systems, making high-performance I/O accessible to the broader scientific computing community.
Why This Matters
Scientific applications write and read large datasets through storage hierarchies that now include memory, node-local NVMe, burst buffers, and parallel file systems. Hermes buffers I/O across those tiers so that applications spend less time waiting for data.