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Exploiting Shared Memory to Improve Parallel I/O Performance

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Recent Advances in Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface (EuroPVM/MPI 2006)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 4192))

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Abstract

We explore several methods utilizing system-wide shared memory to improve the performance of MPI-IO, particularly for non-contiguous file access. We introduce an abstraction called the datatype iterator that permits efficient, dynamic generation of (offset, length) pairs for a given MPI derived datatype. Combining datatype iterators with overlapped I/O and computation, we demonstrate how a shared memory MPI implementation can utilize more than 90% of the available disk bandwidth (in some cases representing a 5× performance improvement over existing methods) even for extreme cases of non-contiguous datatypes. We generalize our results to suggest possible parallel I/O performance improvements on systems without global shared memory.

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© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Hastings, A.B., Choudhary, A. (2006). Exploiting Shared Memory to Improve Parallel I/O Performance. In: Mohr, B., Träff, J.L., Worringen, J., Dongarra, J. (eds) Recent Advances in Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface. EuroPVM/MPI 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4192. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11846802_33

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11846802_33

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-39110-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-39112-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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