Title :
Flexible and efficient parallel I/O for large-scale multi-component simulations
Author :
Ma, Xiaosong ; Jiao, Xiangmin ; Campbell, Michael ; Winslett, Marianne
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Comput. Sci., Illinois Univ., Urbana, IL, USA
Abstract :
In this paper, we discuss our experience of providing high performance parallel I/O for a large-scale, on-going, multi-disciplinary simulation project for solid propellant rockets. We describe the performance and data management issues observed in this project and present our solutions, including (1) support for relatively fine-grained distribution of irregular datasets in parallel I/O, (2) a flexible data management facility for inter-module communication, and (3) two schemes to overlap computation with I/O. Performance results obtained from both development and production platforms show that our I/O optimizations can dramatically reduce the simulation´s visible I/O cost, as well as the number of disk files, and significantly improve the overall performance. Meanwhile, our data management facility helps to provide simulation developers with simple user interfaces for parallel I/O.
Keywords :
aerospace computing; aerospace simulation; parallel programming; performance evaluation; rockets; user interfaces; data management; fine-grained distribution; flexible data management; inter-module communication; irregular datasets; large-scale multi-component simulations; multi-disciplinary simulation project; parallel I/O; performance; solid propellant rockets; user interfaces; Computational modeling; Concurrent computing; Cost function; Distributed computing; Large-scale systems; Production; Project management; Propulsion; Rockets; Solid modeling;
Conference_Titel :
Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, 2003. Proceedings. International
Print_ISBN :
0-7695-1926-1
DOI :
10.1109/IPDPS.2003.1213462
