Lightweight I/O for scientific applications

Ron A. Oldfield, Lee Ward, Rolf Riesen, Arthur B. Maccabe, Patrick Widener, Todd Kordenbrock

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

41 Scopus citations

Abstract

Today's high-end massively parallel processing (MPP) machines have thousands to tens of thousands of processors, with next-generation systems planned to have in excess of one hundred thousand processors. For systems of such scale, efficient I/O is a significant challenge that cannot be solved using traditional approaches. In particular, general purpose parallel file systems that limit applications to standard interfaces and access policies do not scale and will likely be a performance bottleneck for many scientific applications. In this paper, we investigate the use of a "lightweight" approach to I/O that requires the application or I/O-library developer to extend a core set of critical I/O functionality with the minimum set of features and services required by its target applications. We argue that this approach allows the development of I/O libraries that are both scalable and secure. We support our claims with preliminary results for a lightweight checkpoint operation on a development cluster at Sandia.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2006 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing, Cluster 2006
DOIs
StatePublished - 2006
Externally publishedYes
Event2006 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing, Cluster 2006 - Barcelona, Spain
Duration: Sep 25 2006Sep 28 2006

Publication series

NameProceedings - IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing, ICCC
ISSN (Print)1552-5244

Conference

Conference2006 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing, Cluster 2006
Country/TerritorySpain
CityBarcelona
Period09/25/0609/28/06

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