Abstract
Data prefetching can be beneficial for improving
parallel I/O system performance, but the amount of benefit
depends on how efficiently and swiftly prefetches can be done. In
this study, we propose a new prefetching strategy, called
collective prefetching. The idea is to exploit the correlation among
I/O accesses of multiple processes of a parallel application and
carry out prefetches collectively, instead of the traditional
strategy of carrying out prefetches by each process individually.
The rationale behind this new collective prefetching strategy is
that the concurrent processes of the same parallel application
have strong correlation with respect to their I/O requests. We
present the idea, initial design and implementation of the new
collective prefetching strategy in this study. The preliminary
experimental results show that this new collective prefetching
strategy holds promise for improving parallel I/O performance.
