Design and Evaluation of a Compiler-Directed Collective I/O Technique

Abstract. Current approaches to parallel I/O demand extensive user effort to obtain acceptable performance. This is in part due to difficulties in understanding the characteristics of a wide variety of I/O devices and in part due to inherent complexity of I/O software. While parallel I/O systems provide users with environments where large datasets can be shared between parallel processors, the ultimate performance of I/O-intensive codes depends largely on the relation between data access patterns and storage patterns of data in files and on disks. Collective I/O is one of the most popular methods to access the data when the storage and access patterns do not match. In this strategy, each processor does I/O on behalf of other processors if doing so improves the overall performance. While it is generally accepted that collective I/O and its variants can bring impressive improvements as far as the I/O performance is concerned, it is difficult for the programmer to use collective I/O effec...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: EUROPAR
• Authors: Gokhan Memik, Mahmut T. Kandemir, Alok N. Choudhary
• Keywords: Collective I/o, Collective I/o Scheme, Distributed And Parallel Computing, EUROPAR 2000, Parallel I/o