High Performance File I/O for The Blue Gene/L Supercomputer
Hang Yu, Ranjan Kumar Sahoo, Christopher Howson, George S. Almasi, José G. Castaños, Manish Kumar Gupta, José Eduardo Moreira, Jeffrey J. Parker, Thomas Engelsiepen, Robert B. Ross, Rajeev Thakur, Robert P. Latham, William Gropp · 2006
Parallel I/O plays a crucial role for most data-intensive applications running on massively parallel systems like Blue Gene/L that provides the promise of delivering enormous computational capability. We designed and implemented a highly scalable parallel file I/O architecture for Blue Gene/L, which leverages the benefit of the hierarchical and functional partitioning design of the system software with separate computational and I/O cores. The architecture exploits the scalability aspect of GPFS (General Parallel File System) at the backend, while using MPI I/O as an interface between the application I/O and the file system. We demonstrate the impact of our high performance I/O solution for Blue Gene/L with a comprehensive evaluation that consists of a number of widely used parallel I/O benchmarks and I/O intensive applications. Our design and implementation is not only able to deliver at least one order of magnitude speed up in terms of I/O bandwidth for a real-scale application HOMME (achieving aggregate bandwidth of 1.8 GB/Sec and 2.3 GB/Sec for write and read accesses, respectively), but also supports high-level parallel I/O data interfaces such as parallel HDF5 and parallel NetCDF scaling up to a large number of processors.