Advances in storage are becoming increasingly critical because workloads on high performance computing (HPC) and cloud systems are producing and consuming more data than ever before, and the situation promises to only increase in future years. Additionally, the last decades have seen relatively few changes in the structure of parallel file systems, and limited interaction between the evolution of parallel file systems, e.g., Lustre, GPFS, and I/O support systems that take advantage of hierarchical storage layers, e.g., node local burst buffers. However, recently the community has seen a large uptick in innovations in storage systems and I/O support software for several reasons:

• Technology: The availability of an increasing number of persistent solid-state storage technologies that can replace either memory or disk are creating new opportunities for the structure of storage systems.

• Performance requirements: Disk-based parallel file systems cannot satisfy the performance needs of high-end systems. However, it is not clear how solid-state storage can best be used to achieve the needed performance, so new approaches for using solid-state storage in HPC systems are being designed and evaluated.

• Application evolution: Data analysis applications, including graph analytics and machine learning, are becoming increasingly important both for scientific computing and for commercial computing.  I/O is often a major bottleneck for such applications, both in cloud and HPC environments – especially when fast turnaround or integration of heavy computation and analysis are required.

• Infrastructure evolution. HPC technology will not only be deployed in dedicated supercomputing centers in the future. “Embedded HPC”, “HPC in the box”, “HPC in the loop”, “HPC in the cloud”, “HPC as a service”, and “near- to-real-time simulation” are concepts requiring new small-scale deployment environments for HPC. A federation of systems and functions with consistent mechanisms for managing I/O, storage, and data processing across all participating systems will be required to create a “continuum” of computing.

• Virtualization and disaggregation: As virtualization and disaggregation become broadly used in cloud and HPC computing, the issue of virtualized storage has increasing importance and efforts will be needed to understand its implications for performance.

Our goals in the ESSA Workshop are to bring together expert researchers and developers in data-related areas including storage, I/O, processing and analysis on extreme scale infrastructures including HPC systems, clouds, edge systems or hybrid combinations of those, to discuss advances and possible solutions to the new challenges we face.