I/O characterization of a portable astrophysics application on the IBM SP and Intel Paragon

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Abstract
Many large-scale applications on parallel machines are bottlenecked by the I/O performance rather than the CPU or communication performance of the system. To improve the I/O performance, it is first necessary for system designers to understand the I/O requirements of various applications. This paper presents results of a study of the I/O characteristics and performance of a real, large- scale, portable, parallel application in astrophysics, on two different parallel machines--the IBM SP and the Intel Paragon. We instrumented the source code to record all I/O activity and analyzed the resulting trace files. Results show that, for this application, the I/O consists of fairly large writes, and writing data to files is faster on the Paragon, whereas opening and closing files are faster on the SP.

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