Title :
Measurement and simulation based performance analysis of parallel I/O in a high-performance cluster system
Author :
Natarajan, Chitra ; Iyer, Ravishankar K.
Author_Institution :
Coordinated Sci. Lab., Illinois Univ., Urbana, IL, USA
Abstract :
This paper presents a measurement and simulation based study of parallel I/O in a high-performance cluster system: the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) DEC Alpha Supercluster. The measurements were used to characterize the performance bottlenecks and the throughput limits at the compute and I/O nodes, and to provide realistic input parameters to PioSim, a simulation environment we have developed to investigate parallel I/O performance issues in cluster systems. PioSim was used to obtain a detailed characterization of parallel I/O performance, in the high performance cluster system, for different regular access patterns and different system configurations. This paper also explores the use of local disks at the compute nodes for parallel I/O, and finds that the local disk architecture outperforms the traditional parallel I/O over remote I/O node disks architecture, even when as much as 68-75% of the requests from each compute node goes to remote disks
Keywords :
digital simulation; parallel processing; performance evaluation; DEC Alpha Supercluster; PioSim; Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center; high-performance cluster system; local disk architecture; local disks; parallel I/O; performance bottlenecks; regular access patterns; simulation based performance analysis; simulation environment; system configurations; throughput limits; Analytical models; Computational modeling; Computer architecture; Concurrent computing; Coordinate measuring machines; File systems; High performance computing; Performance analysis; System performance; Throughput;
Conference_Titel :
Parallel and Distributed Processing, 1996., Eighth IEEE Symposium on
Conference_Location :
New Orleans, LA
Print_ISBN :
0-8186-7683-3
DOI :
10.1109/SPDP.1996.570351
