Design and Implementation of a Parallel I/O Runtime System for Irregular Applications

✍ Scribed by Jaechun No; Sung-soon Park; Jesus Carretero Perez; Alok Choudhary

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 443 KB
• Volume: 62
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0743-7315
• DOI: 10.1006/jpdc.2001.1788

✦ Synopsis

We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a runtime system based on collective I/O techniques for irregular applications. The design is motivated by the requirements of a large number of science and engineering applications including teraflops applications, where the data must be reorganized into a canonical form for further processing or restarts. We present two designs: ''collective I/O'' and ''pipelined collective I/O.'' In the first design, all processors participate in I/O simultaneously, making scheduling of I/O requests simpler but creating possible contention at the I/O nodes. In the second design, processors are organized into several groups so that only one group performs I/O while the next group performs the communication to rearrange data and this entire process is dynamically pipelined to reduce I/O node contention. In other words, the design provides support for dynamic contention management. We also present a software caching method using collective I/O to reduce I/O cost by reusing the data already present in the memory of other nodes. Chunking and on-line compression mechanisms are included in both models. We present performance results on the Intel Paragon at Caltech and on the ASCI/Red teraflops machine at Sandia National Laboratories.