Input/output characteristics of scalable parallel applications

  • Authors:

  • Phyllis E. Crandall;Ruth A. Aydt;Andrew A. Chien;Daniel A. Reed

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois;Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois;Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois;Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois

  • Venue:
  • Supercomputing '95 Proceedings of the 1995 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
  • Year:
  • 1995

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Abstract

Rapid increases in computing and communication performance are exacerbating the long-standing problem of performance-limited input/output. Indeed, for many otherwise scalable parallel applications. input/output is emerging as a major performance bottleneck. The design of scalable input/output systems depends critically on the input/output requirements and access patterns for this emerging class of large-scale parallel applications. However, hard data on the behavior of such applications is only now becoming available. In this paper, we describe the input-output requirements of three scalable parallel applications (electron scattering, terrain rendering, and quantum chemistry, on the Intel Paragon XP/S. As part of an ongoing parallel input/output characterization effort, we used instrumented versions of the application codes to capture and analyze input/output volume, request size distributions, and temporal request structure. Because complete traces of individual application input/output requests were captured, in-depth, off-line analyses were possible. In addition, we conducted informal interviews of the application developers to understand the relation between the codes' current and desired input/output structure. The results of our studies show a wide variety of temporal and spatial access patterns, including highly read-intensive and write-intensive phases, extremely large and extremely small request sizes, and both sequential and highly irregular access patterns. We conclude with a discussion of the broad spectrum of access patterns and their profound implications for parallel file caching and prefetching schemes.