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Fast Parallel I/O on Cluster Computers

Thomas Duessel·Norbert Eicker·Florin Isaila·Thomas Lippert·Thomas Moschny·Hartmut Neff·Klaus Schilling·Walter Tichy
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Abstract

Today's cluster computers suffer from slow I/O, which slows down I/O-intensive applications. We show that fast disk I/O can be achieved by operating a parallel file system over fast networks such as Myrinet or Gigabit Ethernet. In this paper, we demonstrate how the ParaStation3 communication system helps speed-up the performance of parallel I/O on clusters using the open source parallel virtual file system (PVFS) as testbed and production system. We will describe the set-up of PVFS on the Alpha-Linux-Cluster-Engine (ALiCE) located at Wuppertal University, Germany. Benchmarks on ALiCE achieve write-performances of up to 1 GB/s from a 32-processor compute-partition to a 32-processor PVFS I/O-partition, outperforming known benchmark results for PVFS on the same network by more than a factor of 2. Read-performance from buffer-cache reaches up to 2.2 GB/s. Our benchmarks are giant, I/O-intensive eigenmode problems from lattice quantum chromodynamics, demonstrating stability and performance of PVFS over Parastation in large-scale production runs.

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Thomas Duessel, Norbert Eicker, Florin Isaila, Thomas Lippert, Thomas Moschny, Hartmut Neff, Klaus Schilling, Walter Tichy. 2003-03-19. Fast Parallel I/O on Cluster Computers. https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0303016

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