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Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

1995

Computer Sciences

Dartmouth Scholarship

Articles 1 - 7 of 7

Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Expanding The Potential For Disk-Directed I/O, David Kotz Oct 1995

Expanding The Potential For Disk-Directed I/O, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

As parallel computers are increasingly used to run scientific applications with large data sets, and as processor speeds continue to increase, it becomes more important to provide fast, effective parallel file systems for data storage and for temporary files. In an earlier work we demonstrated that a technique we call disk-directed I/O has the potential to provide consistent high performance for large, collective, structured I/O requests. In this paper we expand on this potential by demonstrating the ability of a disk-directed I/O system to read irregular subsets of data from a file, and to filter and distribute incoming data according …


Enwrich: A Compute-Processor Write Caching Scheme For Parallel File Systems, Apratim Purakayastha, Carla Schlatter Ellis, David Kotz Oct 1995

Enwrich: A Compute-Processor Write Caching Scheme For Parallel File Systems, Apratim Purakayastha, Carla Schlatter Ellis, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

Many parallel scientific applications need high-performance I/O. Unfortunately, end-to-end parallel-I/O performance has not been able to keep up with substantial improvements in parallel-I/O hardware because of poor parallel file-system software. Many radical changes, both at the interface level and the implementation level, have recently been proposed. One such proposed interface is \em collective I/O, which allows parallel jobs to request transfer of large contiguous objects in a single request, thereby preserving useful semantic information that would otherwise be lost if the transfer were expressed as per-processor non-contiguous requests. Kotz has proposed \em disk-directed I/O as an efficient implementation technique for …


Disk-Directed I/O For An Out-Of-Core Computation, David Kotz Aug 1995

Disk-Directed I/O For An Out-Of-Core Computation, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

New file systems are critical to obtain good I/O performance on large multiprocessors. Several researchers have suggested the use of \em collective\/ file-system operations, in which all processes in an application cooperate in each I/O request. Others have suggested that the traditional low-level interface (\tt read, write, seek) be augmented with various higher-level requests (e.g., \em read matrix). Collective, high-level requests permit a technique called \em disk-directed I/O\/ to significantly improve performance over traditional file systems and interfaces, at least on simple I/O benchmarks. In this paper, we present the results of experiments with an “out-of-core” LU-decomposition program. Although its …


Low-Level Interfaces For High-Level Parallel I/O, Nils Nieuwejaar, David Kotz Apr 1995

Low-Level Interfaces For High-Level Parallel I/O, Nils Nieuwejaar, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

As the I/O needs of parallel scientific applications increase, file systems for multiprocessors are being designed to provide applications with parallel access to multiple disks. Many parallel file systems present applications with a conventional Unix-like interface that allows the application to access multiple disks transparently. By tracing all the activity of a parallel file system in a production, scientific computing environment, we show that many applications exhibit highly regular, but non-consecutive I/O access patterns. Since the conventional interface does not provide an efficient method of describing these patterns, we present three extensions to the interface that support \em strided, \em …


Exploring The Use Of I/O Nodes For Computation In A Mimd Multiprocessor, David Kotz, Ting Cai Apr 1995

Exploring The Use Of I/O Nodes For Computation In A Mimd Multiprocessor, David Kotz, Ting Cai

Dartmouth Scholarship

As parallel systems move into the production scientific-computing world, the emphasis will be on cost-effective solutions that provide high throughput for a mix of applications. Cost-effective solutions demand that a system make effective use of all of its resources. Many MIMD multiprocessors today, however, distinguish between “compute” and “I/O” nodes, the latter having attached disks and being dedicated to running the file-system server. This static division of responsibilities simplifies system management but does not necessarily lead to the best performance in workloads that need a different balance of computation and I/O. \par Of course, computational processes sharing a node with …


Disk-Directed I/O For Mimd Multiprocessors, David Kotz Jan 1995

Disk-Directed I/O For Mimd Multiprocessors, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

Many scientific applications that run on today's multiprocessors are bottlenecked by their file I/O needs. Even if the multiprocessor is configured with sufficient I/O hardware, the file-system software often fails to provide the available bandwidth to the application. Although libraries and improved file-system interfaces can make a significant improvement, we believe that fundamental changes are needed in the file-server software. We propose a new technique, \em disk-directed I/O, that flips the usual relationship between server and client to allow the disks (actually, disk servers) to determine the flow of data for maximum performance. Our simulations show that tremendous performance gains …


File-System Workload On A Scientific Multiprocessor, David Kotz, Nils Nieuwejaar Jan 1995

File-System Workload On A Scientific Multiprocessor, David Kotz, Nils Nieuwejaar

Dartmouth Scholarship

No abstract provided.