Remote Parallel I/O in Grid Environments

Abstract

Although processor speed and memory bandwidth as well as capacities of persistent storage devices evolved rapidly in the last years, the bandwidth between memory and persistent storage devices could not match that pace. As current scientific applications tend to process an enormous amount of data at runtime, the access to a local disk might become the main performance bottleneck.

The communication infrastructure for local area networks has also evolved rapidly, thus modern filesystems for supercomputing are using storage area network solutions to distribute the load of application i/o to several special purpose i/o nodes. These san solutions, however, are often bound to a specific organizational structure, such as different locations of the same company or several institutes of a university. This often implies a common user base and accounting information at each site. In a highly variant grid environment these demands might be hard to meet.

This paper describes the definition of two adio devices for romio, a publicly available mpii/o implementation, to provide transparent access to remote parallel i/o and additionally access to remote i/o on files in the memory of a remote server. The architecture of these devices allows for a definition of remote servers on a per job basis, and can be configured by the user before runtime.