Abstract-device interface for implementing portable parallel-I/O interfaces

摘要

Portable parallel programming has been hampered by the lack of a single, standard, portable application-programmer's interface (API) for parallel I/O. Instead, the programmer must choose from several different APIs, many of which are not portable. To alleviate this problem, the authors have developed an abstract-device interface for parallel I/O, called ADIO. ADIO is not intended as a new API; rather, it is a strategy for implementing other APIs in a simple, portable, and efficient manner. ADIO facilitates the implementation of any existing or new API on any existing or new file system. ADIO thus enables users to experiment with different APIs, a feature that, they think, would help in the definition of a standard API. It also makes existing applications portable across a wide range of platforms. In this paper, they introduce the concept of ADIO. They describe the design of ADIO and its use in implementing APIs. They have currently implemented subsets of the Intel PFS, IBM PIOFS, and MPI-IO APIs on both the PFS and PIOFS file systems. As a result, they are able to run IBM PIOFS applications on the Intel Paragon, Intel PFS applications on the IBM SP, and MPI-IO applications on both systems. They report performance results obtained from two test programs and one real production application on the SP and Paragon. These results indicate that the performance overhead of using ADIO as an implementation strategy is negligible.