An Experimental Evaluation of I/O Optimizations on Different Applications

Many large scale applications have significant I/O requirements as well as computational and memory requirements. Unfortunately, the limited number of I/O nodes provided in a typical configuration of the modern message-passing distributed-memory architectures such as Intel Paragon and IBM SP-2 limits the I/O performance of these applications severely. In this paper, we examine some software optimization techniques and evaluate their effects in five different I/O-intensive codes from both small and large application domains. Our goals in this study are twofold. First, we want to understand the behavior of large-scale data-intensive applications and the impact of I/O subsystems on their performance and vice versa. Second, and more importantly, we strive to determine the solutions for improving the applications' performance by a mix of software techniques. Our results reveal that different applications can benefit from different optimizations. For example, we found that some applicat...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: TPDS
• Authors: Meenakshi A. Kandaswamy, Mahmut T. Kandemir, Alok N. Choudhary, David E. Bernholdt
• Keywords: Limited Number, Performance, Software Optimizations, TPDS 2002