Skip to main content
U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

An experimental evaluation of the parallel I/O systems of the IBM SP and Intel Paragon using a production application

Conference ·
OSTI ID:273774

This paper presents the results of an experimental evaluation of the parallel I/O systems of the IBM SP and Intel Paragon. For the evaluation, we used a full, three-dimensional application code that is in production use for studying the nonlinear evolution of Jeans instability in self-gravitating gaseous clouds. The application performs I/O by using library routines that we developed and optimized separately for parallel I/O on the SP and Paragon. The I/O routines perform two-phase I/O and use the PIOFS file system on the SP and PFS on the Paragon. We studied the I/O performance for two different sizes of the application. We found that for the small case, I/O was faster on the SP, whereas for the large case, I/O took almost the same time on both systems. Communication required for I/O was faster on the Paragon in both cases. The highest read bandwidth obtained was 48 Mbytes/sec. and the highest write bandwidth obtained was 31.6 Mbytes/sec., both on the SP.

Research Organization:
Argonne National Lab., IL (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE, Washington, DC (United States); Department of Defense, Washington, DC (United States); National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Washington, DC (United States); National Science Foundation, Washington, DC (United States)
DOE Contract Number:
W-31109-ENG-38
OSTI ID:
273774
Report Number(s):
ANL/MCS-P--569-0296; CONF-9609206--1; ON: DE96013596
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

Similar Records

I/O characterization of a portable astrophysics application on the IBM SP and Intel Paragon
Technical Report · Wed May 01 00:00:00 EDT 1996 · OSTI ID:224841

Early experiences and performance of the Intel Paragon
Technical Report · Mon Aug 01 00:00:00 EDT 1994 · OSTI ID:10180359

Performance of ATM/OC-12 on the Intel Paragon
Technical Report · Wed May 01 00:00:00 EDT 1996 · OSTI ID:257421