Making resonance a common case: a high-performance implementation of collective I/O on parallel file systems
- Los Alamos National Laboratory
- WAYNE STATE UNIV
Collective I/O is a widely used technique to improve I/O performance in parallel computing. It can be implemented as a client-based or server-based scheme. The client-based implementation is more widely adopted in MPI-IO software such as ROMIO because of its independence from the storage system configuration and its greater portability. However, existing implementations of client-side collective I/O do not take into account the actual pattern offile striping over multiple I/O nodes in the storage system. This can cause a significant number of requests for non-sequential data at I/O nodes, substantially degrading I/O performance. Investigating the surprisingly high I/O throughput achieved when there is an accidental match between a particular request pattern and the data striping pattern on the I/O nodes, we reveal the resonance phenomenon as the cause. Exploiting readily available information on data striping from the metadata server in popular file systems such as PVFS2 and Lustre, we design a new collective I/O implementation technique, resonant I/O, that makes resonance a common case. Resonant I/O rearranges requests from multiple MPI processes to transform non-sequential data accesses on I/O nodes into sequential accesses, significantly improving I/O performance without compromising the independence ofa client-based implementation. We have implemented our design in ROMIO. Our experimental results show that the scheme can increase I/O throughput for some commonly used parallel I/O benchmarks such as mpi-io-test and ior-mpi-io over the existing implementation of ROMIO by up to 157%, with no scenario demonstrating significantly decreased performance.
- Research Organization:
- Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC52-06NA25396
- OSTI ID:
- 956499
- Report Number(s):
- LA-UR-09-00201; LA-UR-09-201; TRN: US201013%%197
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium ; May 25, 2009 ; Rome, Italy
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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