Analyzing Parallel Applications for Unnecessary I/O Semantics that Inhibit File System Performance.

Publikation: Beitrag in Buch/Konferenzbericht/Sammelband/GutachtenBeitrag in KonferenzbandBeigetragenBegutachtung

Abstract

Scalability and performance of I/O intensive parallel applications are major concerns in modern High Performance Computing (HPC) environments. Almost all applications use POSIX I/O explicitly or implicitly through third party libraries like MPI-IO to perform I/O operations on the file system. POSIX I/O is known to be one of the lead causes of poor I/O performance due to its restrictive access semantics and consistency requirements. Some file systems therefore relax specific POSIX semantics to alleviate I/O performance penalties. In order to make the most effective use of the offered file systems features it is required to know what kind of POSIX semantics an application requires. Existing tools can analyze parallel I/O performance to report type and duration of executed I/O operations. There are even tools that analyse the consistency requirements of data operations, but none that also consider perfromance critical patterns of metadata operations. In this paper, we present a novel, systematic approach that groups parallel I/O operations and analyzes their I/O semantics with respect to POSIX I/O. We provide the tool rabbitxx that identifies concurrent overlapping accesses to the same file but also identifies metadata accesses such as concurrent create operations in the same directory. Our work indicates that POSIX defined I/O access semantics, in its current form, are often not necessary for parallel applications.

Details

OriginalspracheEnglisch
TitelHigh Performance Computing - ISC High Performance 2023 International Workshops, Revised Selected Papers
Redakteure/-innenAmanda Bienz, Michèle Weiland, Marc Baboulin, Carola Kruse
Seiten161-176
Seitenumfang16
BandLecture Notes in Computer Science
PublikationsstatusVeröffentlicht - 2023
Peer-Review-StatusJa

Externe IDs

ORCID /0000-0002-1686-8440/work/142240066
Scopus 85171383261
Mendeley 68f61220-7047-3c2b-8f28-e1d93fd71b34

Schlagworte

Schlagwörter

  • File system, Semantics, I/O, HPC, Performance Analysis, POSIX