Parallel I/O Support for HPF on Clusters

Clusters of workstations are a popular alternative to integrated parallel systems designed and built by a vendor. Besides their huge cumulative processing power, they also provide a large data storage capacity which allows efficient implementations of large-scale applications which are I/O intensive. This paper proposes a language, compiler and runtime software solution to the problem of parallel I/O on clusters. The proposal is presented in the context of High Performance Fortran and its compiler that is being developed at the University of Vienna. The system provides efficient support for explicit I/O operations on parallel files, accesses to sections of multi-dimensional arrays stored in parallel files, checkpoint/restart operations, and time step output and input operations. The implementation is based on our parallel I/O library implemented on top of MPI. The paper also presents experimental performance results using the implementation of the developed software on a Beowulfclass ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: CCGRID
• Authors: Peter Brezany, Viera Sipková
• Keywords: CCGRID 2001, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Parallel Files, Parallel I/o, Parallel I/o Library