Evaluating Algorithms for Shared File Pointer Operations in MPI I/O

MPI-I/O is a part of the MPI-2 specification defining file I/O operations for parallel MPI applications. Compared to regular POSIX style I/O functions, MPI I/O offers features like the distinction between individual file pointers on a per-process basis and a shared file pointer across a group of processes. The objective of this study is the evaluation of various algorithms of shared file pointer operations for MPI-I/O. We present three algorithms to provide shared file pointer operations on file systems that do not support file locking. The evaluation of the algorithms is carried out utilizing a parallel PVFS2 file system on an InfiniBand cluster and a local ext3 file system using a 8-core SMP.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ICCS
• Authors: Ketan Kulkarni, Edgar Gabriel
• Keywords: ICCS 2009, file I/o Operations, file Pointer, file Pointer Operations