Exploring I/O

31 January 2018

Dr Elsa Gonsiorowski is visiting EPCC from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, this week. Dr Gonsiorowski is working closely with EPCC's David Henty on various parallel I/O research topics. In this post she introduces her work.

While here, Dr Henty and I will explore a number of I/O-related topics. Our work will focus on analyzing Archer performance statistics and developing generic I/O guidelines for HPC applications.

I currently develop two I/O tools. The first is MACSio (Multi-purpose, Application-Centric, Scalable I/O Proxy Application), which is used to emulate the I/O behavior of physics and mesh-based simulation applications. MACSio can also be used as a benchmark for I/O performance of a system. The second is the Scalable Checkpoint/Restart (SCR) library. This library enables MPI applications to utilize distributed storage on Linux clusters to attain high file I/O bandwidth for checkpointing, restarting, and writing large datasets.

As a follow-on to the week-long collaboration, I will present my work at EPCC on February 28. I will also write a more in-depth blog post.

This collaboration is funded by the EPSRC USA-UK travel fund.