An experimental evaluation of the parallel I/O systems of the IBM SP and Intel Paragon using a production application

Rajeev Thakur, William Gropp, Ewing Lusk

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

We present the results of an experimental evaluation of the parallel I/O systems of the IBM SP and Intel Paragon using a real three-dimensional parallel application code. This application, developed by scientists at the University of Chicago, simulates the gravitational collapse of self-gravitating gaseous clouds. It performs parallel I/O by using library routines that we developed and optimized separately for the SP and Paragon. The I/O routines perform two-phase I/O and use the parallel file systems PIOFS on the SP and PFS on the Paragon. We studied the I/O performance for two different sizes of the application. In the small case, we found that I/O was much faster on the SP. In the large case, open, close, and read operations were only slightly faster, and seeks were significantly faster, on the SP; whereas, writes were slightly faster on the Paragon. The communication required within our I/O routines was faster on the Paragon in both cases. The highest read bandwidth obtained was 48 Mbytes/sec., and the highest write bandwidth obtained was 31.6 Mbytes/sec., both on the SP.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationParallel Computation - 3rd International ACPC Conference with Special Emphasis on Parallel Databases and Parallel I/O, Proceedings
EditorsLaszlo Boszormenyi
PublisherSpringer
Pages24-35
Number of pages12
ISBN (Print)3540616950, 9783540616955
DOIs
StatePublished - 1996
Externally publishedYes
Event3rd International Austrian Center for Parallel Computation Conference with Special Emphasis on Parallel Databases and Parallel I/O, 1996 - Klagenfurt, Austria
Duration: Sep 23 1996Sep 25 1996

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume1127
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Other

Other3rd International Austrian Center for Parallel Computation Conference with Special Emphasis on Parallel Databases and Parallel I/O, 1996
Country/TerritoryAustria
CityKlagenfurt
Period9/23/969/25/96

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Computer Science(all)

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