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Achieving Computational I/O Efficiency in a High Performance Cluster Using Multicore Processors...

by Li Ou, Xin Chen, X. He, Christian Engelmann, Steven L Scott
Publication Type
Conference Paper
Book Title
Internet Proceedings
Publication Date
Page Number
0
Conference Name
High Availability and Performance Workshop (HAPCW) 2006
Conference Location
Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States of America
Conference Date

Cluster computing has become one of the most popular platforms for high-performance computing today. The recent popularity of multicore processors provides a Flexible way to increase the computational capability of clusters. Although the system performance may improve with multicore processors in a cluster, I/O requests initiated by multiple cores may saturate the I/O bus, and furthermore increase the latency by issuing multiple non-contiguous disk accesses. In this paper, we propose an asymmetric collective I/O for multicore
processors to improve multiple non-contiguous accesses. In our configuration, one core in each multicore processor is designated as the coordinator, and others serve as computing cores. The coordinator is responsible for aggregating I/O operations from computing cores and submitting a contiguous request. The
coordinator allocates contiguous memory buffers on behalf of other cores to avoid redundant data copies.