Performing Out-of Core FFTs on Parallel Disk Systems

The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) plays a key role in many areas of computational science and engineering. Although most one-dimensional FFT problems canbe entirely solvedentirely in main memory, some important classes of applications require out-of-core techniques. For these, use of parallel I/O systems can improve performance considerably. This paper shows how to perform one-dimensional FFTs using a parallel disk system with independent disk accesses. We present both analytical and experimental results for performing out-of-core FFTs in two ways: using traditional virtual memory with demand paging, and using a provably asymptotically optimal algorithm for the Parallel Disk Model (PDM) of Vitter and Shriver. When run on a DEC 2100 server with a large memory and eight parallel disks, the optimal algorithm for the PDM runs up to 144.7 times faster than in-core methods under demand paging. Moreover, even including I/O costs, the normalized times for the optimal PDM algorithm are competit...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 1998
• Where: PC
• Authors: Thomas H. Cormen, David M. Nicol
• Keywords: Management, One-dimensional Ffts, Optimal Algorithm, Parallel Disks, PC 1998