Improving MPI independent write performance using a two-stage write-behind buffering method

Wei Keng Liao, Avery Ching, Kenin Coloma, Alok Choudhary, Mahmut Kandemir

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

7 Scopus citations

Abstract

Many large-scale production applications often have very long executions times and require periodic data check-points in order to save the state of the computation for program restart and/or tracing application progress. These write-only operations often dominate the overall application runtime, which makes them a good optimization target. Existing approaches for write-behind data buffering at the MPI I/O level have been proposed, but challenges still exist for addressing system-level I/O issues. We propose a two-stage write-behind buffering scheme for handing checkpoint operations. The first-stage of buffering accumulates write data for better network utilization and the second-stage of buffering enables the alignment for the write requests to the file stripe boundaries. Aligned I/O requests avoid file lock contention that can seriously degrade I/O performance. We present our performance evaluation using BTIO benchmarks on both GPFS and Lustre file systems. With the two-stage buffering, the performance of BTIO through MPI independent I/O is significantly improved and even surpasses that of collective I/O.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 21st International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, IPDPS 2007; Abstracts and CD-ROM
DOIs
StatePublished - 2007
Event21st International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, IPDPS 2007 - Long Beach, CA, United States
Duration: Mar 26 2007Mar 30 2007

Publication series

NameProceedings - 21st International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, IPDPS 2007; Abstracts and CD-ROM

Other

Other21st International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, IPDPS 2007
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityLong Beach, CA
Period3/26/073/30/07

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Software
  • General Mathematics

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