A Study of Real World I/O Performance in Parallel Scientific Computing

摘要

Parallel computing is indisputably present in the future of high performance computing. For distributed memory systems, MPI is widely accepted as a de facto standard. However, I/O is often neglected when considering parallel performance. In this article, a number of I/O strategies for distributed memory systems will be examined. These will be evaluated in the context of COOLFluiD, a framework for object oriented computational fluid dynamics. The influence of the system and software architecture on performance will be studied. Benchmark results will be provided, enabling a comparison between some commonly used parallel file systems.