MPI-IO/GPFS, an Optimized Implementation of MPI-IO on top of GPFS

Abstract

MPI-IO/GPFS is an optimized prototype implementation of the I/O chapter of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) 2 standard. It uses the IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS) Release 3 as the underlying file system. This paper describes optimization features of the prototype that take advantage of new GPFS programming interfaces. It also details how collective data access operations have been optimized by minimizing the number of messages exchanged in sparse accesses and by increasing the overlap of communication with file access. Experimental results show a performance gain. A study of the impact of varying the number of tasks running on the same node is also presented.