ROMIO

If you would like to learn more about I/O in High Performance Computing, come check out our SC 2017 tutorial Parallel I/O in Practice. We will cover the hardware and software that makes up the software stack on large parallel computers. MPI-IO takes up a big chunk of time, as do the I/O libraries which typically sit on top of MPI-IO.
If you are interested in ROMIO, you hopefully are familiar with Darshan for collecting statistics and otherwise characterizing you your I/O patterns. These other Darshan-related events will likely be of interest to you:
Thursday’s “Analyzing Parallel I/O” BoF by Phil Carns and Julian Kunkel.  Several guests will share their experiences in analyzing I/O performance and participate in a panel discussion:
http://sc17.supercomputing.org/presentation/?id=bof136&sess=sess364
https://wr.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/events/2017/bof-analyzing
Glenn Lockwood will be presenting a paper entitled “UMAMI: A Recipe for Generating Meaningful Metrics through Holistic I/O Performance Analysis” at the PDSW-DISCS workshop on Monday as well!  It highlights how to integrate I/O monitoring data from multiple sources into a coherent view.
http://www.pdsw.org/index.shtml

presentations

Data Direct has a storage product called “Infinte Memory Engine“.   You can access this accelerated storage through POSIX but there is also a library-level native interface.
DDN recently contributed a ROMIO driver to use the IME “native” interfaces, and I have merged this into MPICH master for an upcoming release.  Thanks!
For most people, this new feature will only be exciting if you have a DDN storage device with IME.  If you do have such a piece of hardware, you can ask your DDN rep where to get the RPMs for the IME-native library.
I wrote a mocked version for anyone who wants to compile-time test this driver.  All it does is directly invoke the POSIX versions.  You can get ime-mockup from my gitlab repository 

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