SC Conference - Activity Details

Seetharami Seelam  (IBM Research)

Guojing Cong  (IBM Research)

Hui-Fang Wen  (IBM Research)

David Klepacki  (IBM Research)

I-Hsin Chung  (IBM Research)

Tuesday,  10:52AM - 11:14AM

Room PB251

We present an application level I/O caching and prefetching system to hide I/O access latency experienced by parallel applications. Our solution of user controllable caching and prefetching system maintains a file-IO cache in the user space of the application, analyzes the I/O access patterns, prefetches requests, and performs write-back of dirty data to storage asynchronously. So each time the application does not have to pay the full I/O latency penalty in going to the storage and getting the required data. This extra layer will handles the I/O for the application and drives the storage to hardware limits. We have implemented this caching and asynchronous prefetching on the Blue Gene/P system. We present experimental results with ocean and weather related benchmarks: POP, WRF. The initial results on a two-rack BG/P system demonstrate that our method hides access latency and improves application I/O access time by as much as 65%.