Document Type
Conference Paper
Publication Date
4-1995
Publication Title
Proceedings of the IPPS '95 Workshop on Input/Output in Parallel and Distributed Systems (IOPADS)
Department
Department of Computer Science
Abstract
As the I/O needs of parallel scientific applications increase, file systems for multiprocessors are being designed to provide applications with parallel access to multiple disks. Many parallel file systems present applications with a conventional Unix-like interface that allows the application to access multiple disks transparently. By tracing all the activity of a parallel file system in a production, scientific computing environment, we show that many applications exhibit highly regular, but non-consecutive I/O access patterns. Since the conventional interface does not provide an efficient method of describing these patterns, we present three extensions to the interface that support \em strided, \em nested-strided, and \em nested-batched I/O requests. We show how these extensions can be used to express common access patterns.
As the I/O needs of parallel scientific applications increase, file systems for multiprocessors are being designed to provide applications with parallel access to multiple disks. Many parallel file systems present applications with a conventional Unix-like interface that allows the application to access multiple disks transparently. By tracing all the activity of a parallel file system in a production, scientific computing environment, we show that many applications exhibit highly regular, but non-consecutive I/O access patterns. Since the conventional interface does not provide an efficient method of describing these patterns, we present three extensions to the interface that support \em strided, \em nested-strided, and \em nested-batched I/O requests. We show how these extensions can be used to express common access patterns.
Original Citation
Nils Nieuwejaar and David Kotz. Low-level Interfaces for High-level Parallel I/O. InProceedings of the IPPS '95 Workshop on Input/Output in Parallel and Distributed Systems (IOPADS), April 1995.
Dartmouth Digital Commons Citation
Nieuwejaar, Nils and Kotz, David, "Low-Level Interfaces for High-Level Parallel I/O" (1995). Dartmouth Scholarship. 3338.
https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/facoa/3338
Comments
A result of the CHARISMA project.
Listed in the Dartmouth College Computer Science Technical Report Series as PCS-TR95-253 (supersedes PCS-TR94-230).