Scale and performance in a distributed file system
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
Using MPI-2: Advanced Features of the Message Passing Interface
Using MPI-2: Advanced Features of the Message Passing Interface
GPFS: A Shared-Disk File System for Large Computing Clusters
FAST '02 Proceedings of the Conference on File and Storage Technologies
Beyond the Storage Area Network: Data Intensive Computing in a Distributed Environment
MSST '05 Proceedings of the 22nd IEEE / 13th NASA Goddard Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies
Integrated Performance Monitoring of a Cosmology Application on Leading HEC Platforms
ICPP '05 Proceedings of the 2005 International Conference on Parallel Processing
Investigation of leading HPC I/O performance using a scientific-application derived benchmark
Proceedings of the 2007 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
Proceedings of the 2008 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
Performance characteristics of a cosmology package on leading HPC architectures
HiPC'04 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on High Performance Computing
I/O threads to reduce checkpoint blocking for an electromagnetics solver on Blue Gene/P and Cray XK6
Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Runtime and Operating Systems for Supercomputers
A dynamic and adaptive load balancing strategy for parallel file system with large-scale I/O servers
Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing
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With the exponential growth of high-fidelity sensor and simulated data, the scientific community is increasingly reliant on ultrascale HPC resources to handle its data analysis requirements. However, to use such extreme computing power effectively, the I/O components must be designed in a balanced fashion, as any architectural bottleneck will quickly render the platform intolerably inefficient. To understand I/O performance of data-intensive applications in realistic computational settings, we develop a lightweight, portable benchmark called MADbench2, which is derived directly from a large-scale cosmic microwave background (CMB) data analysis package. Our study represents one of the most comprehensive I/O analyses of modern parallel file systems, examining a broad range of system architectures and configurations, including Lustre on the Cray XT3, XT4, and Intel Itanium2 clusters; GPFS on IBM Power5 and AMD Opteron platforms; a BlueGene/P installation using GPFS and PVFS2 file systems; and CXFS on the SGI Altix3700. We present extensive synchronous I/O performance data comparing a number of key parameters including concurrency, POSIX- versus MPI-IO, and unique- versus shared-file accesses, using both the default environment as well as highly tuned I/O parameters. Finally, we explore the potential of asynchronous I/O and show that only the two of the nine evaluated systems benefited from MPI-2's asynchronous MPI-IO. On those systems, experimental results indicate that the computational intensity required to hide I/O effectively is already close to the practical limit of BLAS3 calculations. Overall, our study quantifies vast differences in performance and functionality of parallel file systems across state-of-the-art platforms - showing I/O rates that vary up to 75x on the examined architectures - while providing system designers and computational scientists a lightweight tool for conducting further analysis.