File System Semantics Requirements of HPC Applications

Chen Wang; Kathryn Mohror; Marc Snir

doi:10.1145/3431379.3460637

File System Semantics Requirements of HPC Applications

Chen Wang, Kathryn Mohror, Marc Snir

Siebel School of Computing and Data Science

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

Abstract

Most widely-deployed parallel file systems (PFSs) implement POSIX semantics, which implies sequential consistency for reads and writes. Strict adherence to POSIX semantics is known to impede performance and thus several new PFSs with relaxed consistency semantics and better performance have been introduced. Such PFSs are useful provided that applications can run correctly on a PFS with weaker semantics. While it is widely assumed that HPC applications do not require strict POSIX semantics, to our knowledge there has not been systematic work to support this assumption. In this paper, we address this gap with a categorization of the consistency semantics guarantees of PFSs and develop an algorithm to determine the consistency semantics requirements of a variety of HPC applications. We captured the I/O activity of 17 representative HPC applications and benchmarks as they performed I/O through POSIX or I/O libraries and examined the metadata operations used and their file access patterns. From this analysis, we find that 16 of the 17 applications can utilize PFSs with weaker semantics.

Original language	English (US)
Title of host publication	HPDC 2021 - Proceedings of the 30th International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery
Pages	19-30
Number of pages	12
ISBN (Electronic)	9781450382175
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1145/3431379.3460637
State	Published - Jun 21 2021
Event	30th International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing, HPDC 2021 - Virtual, Online, Sweden Duration: Jun 21 2021 → Jun 25 2021

Publication series

Name	HPDC 2021 - Proceedings of the 30th International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing

Conference

Conference	30th International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing, HPDC 2021
Country/Territory	Sweden
City	Virtual, Online
Period	6/21/21 → 6/25/21

Keywords

consistency semantics
parallel file system
scientific applications

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Computer Science Applications
Software
Computational Theory and Mathematics

Online availability

10.1145/3431379.3460637

Library availability

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Wang, C., Mohror, K., & Snir, M. (2021). File System Semantics Requirements of HPC Applications. In HPDC 2021 - Proceedings of the 30th International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (pp. 19-30). (HPDC 2021 - Proceedings of the 30th International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3431379.3460637

File System Semantics Requirements of HPC Applications. / Wang, Chen; Mohror, Kathryn; Snir, Marc.
HPDC 2021 - Proceedings of the 30th International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing. Association for Computing Machinery, 2021. p. 19-30 (HPDC 2021 - Proceedings of the 30th International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing).

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

Wang, C, Mohror, K & Snir, M 2021, File System Semantics Requirements of HPC Applications. in HPDC 2021 - Proceedings of the 30th International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing. HPDC 2021 - Proceedings of the 30th International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing, Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 19-30, 30th International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing, HPDC 2021, Virtual, Online, Sweden, 6/21/21. https://doi.org/10.1145/3431379.3460637

Wang C, Mohror K, Snir M. File System Semantics Requirements of HPC Applications. In HPDC 2021 - Proceedings of the 30th International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing. Association for Computing Machinery. 2021. p. 19-30. (HPDC 2021 - Proceedings of the 30th International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing). doi: 10.1145/3431379.3460637

Wang, Chen ; Mohror, Kathryn ; Snir, Marc. / File System Semantics Requirements of HPC Applications. HPDC 2021 - Proceedings of the 30th International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing. Association for Computing Machinery, 2021. pp. 19-30 (HPDC 2021 - Proceedings of the 30th International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing).

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File System Semantics Requirements of HPC Applications

Abstract

Publication series

Conference

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Online availability

Library availability

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