Performance Modeling of a Parallel I/O System: An Application Driven Approach.
Evgenia Smirni, Christopher L. Elford, Daniel A. Reed, Andrew A. Chien · 1997
The broadening disparity between the performance of I/O devices and the performance of processors and communication links on parallel platforms is a major obstacle to achieving high performance in many parallel application domains. We believe that understanding the interactions among application I/O access patterns, parallel file systems, and I/O hardware configurations is a prerequisite to identifying levels of I/O parallelism (i.e., the number of disks across which files should be distributed) that maximize application performance. To validate this conjecture, we constructed a series of I/O benchmarks that encapsulate the behavior of a class of I/O intensive access patterns. Performance measurements on the Intel Paragon XP/S demonstrated that the ideal distribution of data across storage devices is a strong function of the I/O access pattern. Based on this experience, we propose a simple, product form queuing network model that effectively predicts the performance of both I/O benchma...