Dynamically adapting file domain partitioning methods for collective I/O based on underlying parallel file system locking protocols

Collective I/O, such as that provided in MPI-IO, enables process collaboration among a group of processes for greater I/O parallelism. Its implementation involves file domain partitioning, and having the right partitioning is a key to achieving high-performance I/O. As modern parallel file systems maintain data consistency by adopting a distributed file locking mechanism to avoid centralized lock management, different locking protocols can have significant impact to the degree of parallelism of a given file domain partitioning method. In this paper, we propose dynamic file partitioning methods that adapt according to the underlying locking protocols in the parallel file systems and evaluate the performance of four partitioning methods under two locking protocols. By running multiple I/O benchmarks, our experiments demonstrate that no single partitioning guarantees the best performance. Using MPI-IO as an implementation platform, we provide guidelines to select the most appropriate partitioning methods for various I/O patterns and file systems.