ENWRICH a Compute-Processor Write Caching Scheme for Parallel File Systems

Many parallel scientific applications need high-performance I/O. Unfortunately, end-to-end parallel-I/O performance has not been able to keep up with substantial improvements in parallel-I/O hardware because of poor parallel file-system software. Many radical changes, both at the interface level and the implementation level, have recently been proposed. One such proposed interface is collective I/O, which allows parallel jobs to request transfer of large contiguous objects in a single request, thereby preserving useful semantic information that would otherwise be lost if the transfer were expressed as per-processor non-contiguous requests. Kotz has proposed disk-directed I/O as an efficient implementation technique for collective-I/O operations, where the compute processors make a single collective data-transfer request, and the I/O processors thereafter take full control of the actual data transfer, exploiting their detailed knowledge of the disk layout to attain substantially improv...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1996
• Where: IOPADS
• Authors: Apratim Purakayastha, Carla Schlatter Ellis, David Kotz
• Keywords: Disk-directed I/o, I/O Processors, IOPADS 1996, Parallel File-system