Applications-driven parallel I/O
Proceedings of the 1993 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
Practical prefetching techniques for multiprocessor file systems
Distributed and Parallel Databases - Selected papers from the first international conference on parallel and distributed information systems
Prefetching in File Systems for MIMD Multiprocessors
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
Implementation of collective I/O in the Intel Paragon parallel file system: initial experiences
ICS '97 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Supercomputing
Orthogonal Striping and Mirroring in Distributed RAID for I/O-Centric Cluster Computing
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
Optimization and evaluation of Hartree-Fock application's I/O with PASSION
SC '97 Proceedings of the 1997 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
Intelligent file management in ubiquitous environments
Proceedings of the 2005 ACM symposium on Applied computing
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The significant difference between the speeds of the I/O system (e.g. disks) and compute processors in parallel systems creates a bottleneck that lowers the performance of an application that does a considerable amount of disk accesses. A major portion of the compute processors' time is wasted on waiting for I/O to complete. This problem can be addressed to a certain extent, if the necessary data can be fetched from the disk before the I/O call to the disk is issued. Fetching data ahead of time, known as prefetching in a multiprocessor environment depends a great deal on the application's access pattern. The subject of this paper is implementation and performance evaluation of a prefetching prototype in a production parallel file system on the Intel Paragon. Specifically, this paper presents a) design and implementation of a prefetching strategy in the parallel file system and b) performance measurements and evaluation of the file system with and without prefetching. The prototype is designed at the operating system level for the PFS. It is implemented in the PFS subsystem of the Intel Paragon Operating System. It is observed that in many cases prefetching provides considerable performance improvements. In some other cases no improvements or some performance degradation is observed due to the overheads incurred in prefetching.