APRIL: A Run-Time Library for Tape-Resident Data

Over the last decade, processors have made enormous gains in speed. But increase in the speed of the secondary and tertiary storage devices could not cope with these gains. The result is that the secondary and tertiary storage access times dominate execution time of data intensive computations. Therefore, in scientific computations, efficient data access functionality for data stored in secondary and tertiary storage is a must. In this paper, we give an overview of APRIL, a parallel runtime library that can be used in applications that process tape-resident data. We present user interface and underlying optimization strategy. We also discuss performance improvements provided by the library on the High Performance Storage System (HPSS). The preliminary results reveal that the optimizations can improve response times by up to 97.2%.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: MSS
• Authors: Gokhan Memik, Mahmut T. Kandemir, Alok N. Choudhary, Valerie E. Taylor
• Keywords: Hardware, MSS 2000, Tertiary Storage, Tertiary Storage Access, Tertiary Storage Devices