Title :
Parallel I/O support for HPF on clusters
Author :
Brezany, Peter ; Sipkova, Viera
Author_Institution :
Inst. for Software Sci., Wien Univ., Austria
Abstract :
Clusters of workstations are a popular alternative to integrated parallel systems designed and built by a vendor Besides their huge cumulative processing power, they also provide a large data storage capacity which allows efficient implementations of large-scale applications which are I/O-intensive. This paper proposes a language, compiler and runtime software solution to the problem of parallel I/O on clusters. The proposal is presented in the context of High Performance Fortran (HPF) and its compilation and runtime environment that is being developed at the University of Vienna. The system provides efficient support for explicit I/O operations on parallel files, accesses to sections of multi-dimensional arrays stored in parallel files, checkpoint/restart operations, and time-step input and output operations. The paper also presents experimental performance results using the implementation of the developed software on a Beowulf-class cluster system
Keywords :
FORTRAN; input-output programs; parallel databases; parallel languages; parallelising compilers; workstation clusters; Beowulf-class cluster system; HPF; High Performance Fortran; I/O-intensive applications; checkpoint/restart operations; compiler; cumulative processing power; data storage capacity; efficient implementations; explicit I/O operations; integrated parallel systems; large-scale applications; multi-dimensional arrays; parallel I/O support; parallel files; performance; programming language; runtime software; time-step input operations; time-step output operations; workstation clusters; File systems; Large-scale systems; Memory; Open source software; Parallel processing; Programming environments; Proposals; Runtime; Software libraries; Workstations;
Conference_Titel :
Cluster Computing and the Grid, 2001. Proceedings. First IEEE/ACM International Symposium on
Conference_Location :
Brisbane, Qld.
Print_ISBN :
0-7695-1010-8
DOI :
10.1109/CCGRID.2001.923192