hao@fast26@USENIX

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#1 Fast Cloud Storage for AI Jobs via Grouped I/O API with Transparent Read/Write Optimizations [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Yingyi Hao, Ting Yao, Xingda Wei, Dingyan Zhang, Tianle Sun, Yiwen Zhang, Zhiyong Fu, Huatao Wu, Rong Chen

The emergence of AI workloads has placed rigorous bandwidth requirements on cloud storage, which are challenging to meet due to inherent hardware restrictions in cost-efficient disaggregated storage architectures, as well as the non-triviality of implementing application-tailored optimizations. This paper presents AITURBO, a cloud storage system for AI jobs with high bandwidth demands. AITURBO first utilizes the high-bandwidth compute fabric between accelerators to meet AI applications’ bandwidth demands without incurring additional storage cost. AITURBO further introduces a simple yet powerful grouped I/O API that allows AITURBO to automatically derive optimized read and write plans at the storage layer. These plans enable optimizations that are comparable or better than application-level ones, because they capture common I/O patterns in AI workloads and have a holistic view from the storage layer’s perspective. Under common AI workloads such as checkpoint reads and writes and KV-cache reads, AITURBO achieves comparable or better performance than state-of-the-art systems, with and without application-level optimizations, including systems such as Megatron, Gemini, and Mooncake, typically with minimal application-level code changes. AITURBO has been deployed in training jobs in HUAWEI’s production cloud to support efficient training workloads.

Subject: USENIX-Fast.2026