Performance Measurement of a Parallel Input/Output System for the Intel iPSC/2 Hypercube

The Intel Concurrent File System (CFS) for the iPSC/2 hypercube is one of the first production file systems to utilize the declustering of large files across numbers of disks to improve I/O performance. The CFS also makes use of dedicated I/O nodes, operating asynchronously, which provide file caching and prefetching. Processing of I/O requests is distributed between the compute node that initiates the request and the I/O nodes that service the request. The effects of the various design decisions in the Intel CFS are difficult to determine without measurements of an actual system. We present performance measurements of the CFS for a hypercube with 32 compute nodes and four I/O nodes (four disks). Measurement of read/write rates for one compute node to one I/O node, one compute node to multiple I/O nodes, and multiple compute nodes to multiple I/O nodes form the basis for the study. Additional measurements show the effects of different buffer sizes, caching, prefetching, and file preallocation on system performance.
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French, JC, TW Pratt, and M Das. "Performance Measurement of a Parallel Input/Output System for the Intel iPSC/2 Hypercube." University of Virginia Institute for Parallel Computation Tech Report (1991).