Self-consistent MPI-IO performance requirements and expectations

We recently introduced the idea of self-consistent performance requirements for MPI communication. Such requirements provide a means to ensure consistent behavior of an MPI library, thereby ensuring a degree of performance portability by making it unnecessary for a user to perform implementation-dependent optimizations by hand. For the collective operations in particular, a large number of such rules could sensibly be formulated, without making hidden assumptions about the underlying communication system or otherwise constraining the MPI implementation. In this paper, we extend this idea to the realm of parallel I/O (MPI-IO), where the issues are far more subtle. In particular, it is not always possible to specify performance requirements without making assumptions about the implementation or without a priori knowledge of the I/O access pattern. For such cases, we introduce the notion of performance expectations, which specify the desired behavior for good implementations of MPI-IO. I/O performance requirements as well as expectations could be automatically checked by an appropriate benchmarking tool.