Wright, Steven A., Hammond, Simon D., Pennycook, Simon J., Miller, I., Herdman, J. A. and Jarvis, Stephen A. (2012) LDPLFS : improving I/O performance without application modification. In: 13th IEEE International Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Scientific and Engineering Computing, Shanghai, China, 21-25 May 2012. Published in: 2012 IEEE 26th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops & PhD Forum (IPDPSW) pp. 1352-1359.

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Abstract

Input/Output (I/O) operations can represent a significant proportion of run-time when large scientific applications are run in parallel and at scale. In order to address the growing divergence between processing speeds and I/O performance, the Parallel Log-structured File System (PLFS) has been developed by EMC Corporation and the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) to improve the performance of parallel file activities. Currently, PLFS requires the use of either (i) the FUSE Linux Kernel module; (ii) a modified MPI library with a customised ROMIO MPI-IO library; or (iii) an application rewrite to utilise the PLFS API directly. In this paper we present an alternative method of utilising PLFS in applications. This method employs a dynamic library to intercept the low-level POSIX operations and retarget them to use the equivalents offered by PLFS. We demonstrate our implementation of this approach, named LDPLFS, on a set of standard UNIX tools, as well on as a set of standard parallel I/O intensive mini-applications. The results demonstrate almost equivalent performance to a modified build of ROMIO and improvements over the FUSE-based approach. Furthermore, through our experiments we demonstrate decreased performance in PLFS when ran at scale on the Lustre file system.

Item Type:	Conference Item (Paper)
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA76 Electronic computers. Computer science. Computer software
Divisions:	Faculty of Science > Computer Science
Journal or Publication Title:	2012 IEEE 26th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops & PhD Forum (IPDPSW)
Publisher:	IEEE
ISBN:	9781467309745
Official Date:	21 May 2012
Dates:	Date Event 21 May 2012 Published
Page Range:	pp. 1352-1359
Identification Number:	10.1109/IPDPSW.2012.172
Status:	Peer Reviewed
Publication Status:	Published
Conference Paper Type:	Paper
Title of Event:	13th IEEE International Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Scientific and Engineering Computing
Type of Event:	Workshop
Location of Event:	Shanghai, China
Date(s) of Event:	21-25 May 2012
URI:	http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/45581

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