Publications Repository - Gdańsk University of Technology

While many scientific, large-scale applications are data-intensive, fast and efficient I/O operations have become of key importance for HPC environments. We propose an MPI I/O extension based on in-system distributed cache with data located in Non-volatile Random Access Memory (NVRAM) available in each cluster node. The presented architecture makes effective use of NVRAM properties such as persistence and byte-level access behind the MPI I/O API. Another advantage of the proposed solution is making development of a parallel application easy and efficient as a programmer just needs to use the well known MPI I/O data model and API while efficient file access is automatically provided without a need for application level optimizations like avoiding frequent operations on a small data. Results of experiments obtained with three different applications suggest, that the extension significantly reduces file access time, especially for small I/O operations. By locating cache facilities on computing nodes, the extension decreases load of file system servers and makes I/O scalable

Authors

• Artur Malinowski link open in new tab ,
• dr hab. inż. Paweł Czarnul link open in new tab ,
• inż. Piotr Dorożyński link open in new tab ,
• Krzysztof Czuryło,
• Łukasz Dorau,
• Maciej Maciejewski,
• Paweł Skowron