Noncontiguous I/O through PVFS

With the tremendous advances in processor and memory technology, I/O has risen to become the bottleneck in high-performance computing for many applications. The development of parallel file systems has helped to ease the performance gap, but I/O still remains an area needing significant performance improvement. Research has found that noncontiguous I/O access patterns in scientific applications combined with current file system methods to perform these accesses lead to unacceptable performance for large data sets. To enhance performance of noncontiguous I/O, we have created list I/O, a native version of noncontiguous I/O. We have used the Parallel Virtual File System (PVFS) to implement our ideas. Our research and experimentation shows that list I/O outperforms current noncontiguous I/O access methods in most I/O situations and can substantially enhance the performance of real-world scientific applications.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: CLUSTER
• Authors: Avery Ching, Alok N. Choudhary, Wei-keng Liao, Robert B. Ross, William Gropp
• Keywords: CLUSTER 2002, Distributed And Parallel Computing, List I/o, Noncontiguous I/o, Noncontiguous I/o Access