Disk-directed I/O for MIMD Multiprocessors
David Kotz, Dartmouth College
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.
author = {David Kotz},
title = {Disk-directed {I/O} for {MIMD} Multiprocessors},
booktitle = {First Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 94)},
year = {1994},
address = {Monterey, CA},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi-94/disk-directed-io-mimd-multiprocessors},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = nov
}