Performance Implications of Architectural and Software Techniques on I/O-Intensive Applications

Many large scale applications, have significant I/O requirements as well as computational and memory requirements. Unfortunately, limited number of I/O nodes provided by the contemporary messagepassing 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 architectural scalability and evaluate the effect of them in five I/O intensive applications 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 subsystem 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 architectural and software solutions. Our results reveal that the different applications can benefit from different optimizations. For example,...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: ICPP
• Authors: Meenakshi A. Kandaswamy, Mahmut T. Kandemir, Alok N. Choudhary, David E. Bernholdt
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, I/O Intensive Applications, I/O Performance, ICPP 1998, Significant I/o Requirements