Models of parallel applications with large computation and I/O requirements

Abstract

A fundamental understanding of the interplay between computation and I/O activities in parallel applications that manipulate huge amounts of data is critical to achieving good application performance, as well as correctly characterizing the workloads of large-scale high-performance parallel systems. In this paper, we present a formal model of the behavior of CPU and I/O interactions in scientific applications, from which we derive various formulas that characterize application performance. Our model captures the I/O and CPU activity at different levels of granularity, where results from the model are shown to be in excellent agreement with measurement data from a set of I/O-intensive applications. Using the formulas from our model, which explicitly take I/O activity into account, we also present examples of possible applications of the model.