An experimental study of input/output characteristics of NASA Earth and Space Sciences applications

Author

Berry, Michael R. ; El-Ghazawi, Tarek A.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. Eng. & Comput. Sci., George Washington Univ., Washington, DC, USA

fYear

1996

fDate

15-19 Apr 1996

Firstpage

741

Lastpage

747

Abstract

Parallel input/output (I/O) workload characterization studies are necessary to better understand the factors that dominate performance. When translated into system design principles, this knowledge can lead to systems with higher performance/cost ratios. In this paper, we present the experimental results of an I/O workload characterization study of NASA Earth and Space Sciences (ESS) applications. Measurements were collected using device driver instrumentation. Baseline measurements with no workload and measurements during regular application runs were collected, analyzed and correlated. It is shown how the observed disk I/O can be identified as block transfers, page requests and cache activity, and how the ESS applications are characterized by a high degree of spatial and temporal locality

Keywords

aerospace computing; astronomy; astronomy computing; computerised instrumentation; geophysics; geophysics computing; input-output programs; parallel programming; space research; storage management; system monitoring; NASA Earth and Space Sciences applications; baseline measurements; block transfers; cache activity; device driver instrumentation; disk I/O; page requests; parallel input/output workload characteristics; performance-dominating factors; performance/cost ratio; spatial locality; system design principles; temporal locality; Application software; Costs; Earth; Electronic switching systems; File systems; Geoscience; Instruments; Libraries; NASA; Operating systems; Sea measurements;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Parallel Processing Symposium, 1996., Proceedings of IPPS '96, The 10th International

Conference_Location

Honolulu, HI

Print_ISBN

0-8186-7255-2

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IPPS.1996.508141

Filename

508141