NPAC Technical Report SCCS-564
Design and Evaluation of Primitives for Parallel I/O
Rajesh Bordawekar, Juan Miguel del Rosario, Alok Choudhary
Submitted November 1 1993
Abstract
In this paper, we show that the performance of parallel file systems
can vary greatly as a function of the selected data distributions,
and that some data distributions can not be supported.
We have devised an alternative scheme for conducting parallel I/O -
the Two-Phase Access Strategy - which guarantees higher and more
consistent performance over a wider spectrum of data distributions.
We have designed and implemented runtime primitives that make
use of the two-phase access strategy to conduct parallel I/O, and
facilitate the programming of parallel I/O operations. We
describe these primitives in detail and provide performance results
which show that I/O access rates are improved by up to several orders
of magnitude. Further, we show that the variation in performance over
various data distributions is restricted to within a factor of 2 of
the best access rate.