Tuning the Performance of I/O
Intensive Parallel Applications
Anurag Acharya,
Mustafa Uysal, Robert Bennett,
Assaf Mendelson, Michael Beynon,
Jeffrey K. Hollingsworth,
Joel Saltz,
and Alan Sussman,
University of Maryland
Abstract:
Getting good I/O performance from parallel programs is a critical
problem for many application domains. In this paper, we report our
experience tuning the I/O performance of four application programs
from the areas of satellite-data processing and linear algebra. After
tuning, three of the four applications achieve application-level I/O
rates of over 100 MB/s on 16 processors. The total volume of I/O
required by the programs ranged from about 75 MB to over
200 GB. We report the lessons learned in achieving high I/O
performance from these applications, including the need for code
restructuring, local disks on every node and knowledge of future I/O
requests. We also report our experience on achieving high performance
on peer-to-peer configurations. Finally, we comment on the necessity
of complex I/O interfaces like collective I/O and strided requests to
achieve high performance.
David Kotz --
Last modified: Thu Feb 1 10:36:43 1996