Title :
Design and evaluation of primitives for parallel I/O
Author :
Bordawekar, Rajesh ; Del Rosario, Juan Miguel ; Choudhary, Alok
Author_Institution :
Northeast Parallel Archit. Center, Syracuse Univ., NY, USA
Abstract :
It is shown that the performance of parallel file systems can vary greatly as a function of the selected data distributions, and that some data distributions can not be supported. The authors have devised an alternative scheme for conducting parallel I/O, the two-phase access strategy, which generates higher and more consistent performance over a wider spectrum of data distributions. They have designed and implemented runtime primitives that make use of the two-phase access strategy to conduct parallel I/O, and facilitate the programming of parallel I/O operations. They describe these primitives in detail and provide performance results which show that I/O access rates are improved by up to several orders of magnitude. Further, they show that the variation in performance over various data distributions is restricted to within a factor of 2 of the best access rate.
Keywords :
file organisation; input-output programs; parallel programming; software performance evaluation; I/O access rates; data distributions; parallel I/O; parallel file systems; parallel programing; performance results; primitives design; primitives evaluation; runtime primitives; two-phase access; Bandwidth; Concurrent computing; Distributed computing; Ducts; File systems; Hardware; Parallel architectures; Parallel programming; Runtime; Scalability;
Conference_Titel :
Supercomputing '93. Proceedings
Print_ISBN :
0-8186-4340-4
DOI :
10.1109/SUPERC.1993.1263493