Disk-directed I/O for MIMD Multiprocessors
David Kotz
Department of Computer Science
Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH 03755
dfk@cs.dartmouth.edu
Abstract
Many scientific applications that run on today's multiprocessors, such
as weather forecasting and seismic analysis, are bottlenecked by their
file-I/O needs. Even if the multiprocessor is configured with
sufficient I/O hardware, the file-system software often fails to
provide the available bandwidth to the application. Although
libraries and enhanced file-system interfaces can make a significant
improvement, we believe that fundamental changes are needed in the
file-server software. We propose a new technique, disk-directed I/O,
to allow the disk servers to determine the flow of data for maximum
performance. Our simulations show that tremendous performance gains
are possible. Indeed, disk-directed I/O provided consistent high
performance that was largely independent of data distribution,
obtained up to 93% of peak disk bandwidth, and was as much as 16 times
faster than traditional parallel file systems.
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