	SSP 1994 project summary:

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An Investigation of Parallel Application I/O

The aim of this project is to evaluate the performance of parallel applications in terms of their I/O. The intention is to produce a report detailing the kinds of optimisation that may be performed for these applications in terms of configuring a parallel I/O system.

This project uses the PUL-PF utility developed at EPCC which provides parallel scalable I/O facilities and is measuring the I/O performance of a representative suite of test applications. The test programs which model the application I/O behaviour are being written as part of the project. It is intended that the I/O models are sophisticated enough that behaviour can be easily tuned by runtime parameters.

A number of PUL-PF configuration attributes will be tested and their effects on I/O performance measured for each of the application types. These will include: different types of parallel file distribution, allocation of I/O server resources, cost of file distribution and remapping, local versus remote server access etc.

It is highly desirable that the benchmarking of the test suite be fully automated and therefore a shell script which can launch the test suite and collate the results from multiple runs without the need for human supervision will also be produced.

Gordon Henderson worked on this project.

Compressed PostScript of Gordon's final report is available here (318969 bytes) .

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