Abstract
We present a fundamental improvement of the generic techniques for non-contiguous file access in MPI-IO. The improvement consists in the replacement of the conventional data management algorithms based on a representation of the non-contiguous fileview as a list of 〈offset, length 〉 tuples. The improvement is termed listless i/o as it instead makes use of space- and time-efficient datatype handling functionality that is completely free of lists for processing non-contiguous data in the file or in memory. Listless i/o has been implemented for both independent and collective file accesses and improves access performance by increasing the data throughput between user buffers and file buffers. Additionally, it reduces the memory footprint of the process performing non-contiguous I/O. In this paper we give results for a synthetic benchmark on a PC cluster using different file systems. We demonstrate improvements in I/O bandwidth that exceed a factor of 10.
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Worringen, J., Träff, J.L., Ritzdorf, H. (2003). Improving Generic Non-contiguous File Access for MPI-IO. In: Dongarra, J., Laforenza, D., Orlando, S. (eds) Recent Advances in Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface. EuroPVM/MPI 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2840. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39924-7_44
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39924-7_44
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