Lessons from characterizing the input/output behavior of parallel scientific applications

As both processor and interprocessor communication hardware is evolving rapidly with only moderate improvements to file system performance in parallel systems, it is becoming increasingly difficult to provide sufficient input/output (I/O) performance to parallel applications. I/O hardware and file system parallelism are the key to bridging this performance gap. Prerequisite to the development of efficient parallel file systems is the detailed characterization of the I/O demands of parallel applications. paper, we present a comparative study of parallel I/O access patterns, commonly found in I/O intensive scientific applications. The Pablo performance analysis tool and its I/O extensions is a valuable resource in capturing and analyzing the I/O access attributes and their interactions with extant parallel I/O systems. This analysis is instrumental in guiding the development of new application programming interfaces (APIs) for parallel file systems and effective file system policies that respond to complex application I/O requirements.