Improving data analysis performance for high-performance computing with integrating statistical metadata in scientific datasets

Scientific datasets and libraries, such as HDF5, ADIOS, and NetCDF, have been used widely in many data intensive applications. These libraries have their special file formats and I/O functions to provide efficient access to large datasets. When the data size keeps increasing, these high level I/O libraries face new challenges. Recent studies have started to utilize database techniques such as indexing and subsetting, and data reorganization to manage the increasing datasets. In this work, we present a new approach to boost the data analysis performance, namely Fast Analysis with Statistical Metadata (FASM), via data subsetting and integrating a small amount of statistics into the original datasets. The added statistical information illustrates the data shape and provides knowledge of the data distribution; therefore the original I/O libraries can utilize these statistical metadata to perform fast queries and analyses. The proposed FASM approach is currently evaluated with the PnetCDF on Lustre file systems, but can also be implemented with other scientific libraries. The FASM can potentially lead to a new dataset design and can have an impact on big data analysis.