@InProceedings{kuo:efficient, author = {S. Kuo and M. Winslett and Y. Cho and J. Lee and Y. Chen}, title = {Efficient Input and Output for Scientific Simulations}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Input/Output in Parallel and Distributed Systems}, year = {1999}, month = {May}, pages = {33--44}, publisher = {ACM Press}, address = {Atlanta, GA}, URL = {http://vibes.cs.uiuc.edu/IOPADS/Accepted/Kuo.ps}, keywords = {scientific computing, simulation, parallel I/O, pario-bib}, abstract = {Large simulations which run for hundreds of hours on parallel computers often periodically generate snapshots of states, which are later post-processed to visualize the simulated physical phenomenon. For many applications, fast I/O during post-processing, which is dependent on an efficient organization of data on disk, is as important as minimizing computation-time I/O. In this paper we propose optimizations to support efficient parallel I/O for scientific simulations and subsequent visualizations. We present an ordering mechanism to linearize data on disk, a performance model to help to choose a proper stripe unit size, and a scheduling algorithm to minimize communication contention. Our experiments on an IBM SP show that the combination of these strategies provides a 20-25\% performance boost.} }