High Performance Parallel I/O Schemes for Irregular Applications on Clusters of Workstations

Due to the convergence of the fast microprocessors with low latency and high bandwidth communication networks, clusters of workstations are being used for high-performance computing. In this paper we present the design and implementation of a runtime system to support irregular applications on cluster of workstations, called “Collective I/O Clustering”. The system provides a friendly programming model for performing I/O in irregular applications on clusters of workstations, and is completely integrated with the underlying communication and I/O system. All the performance results were obtained on the IBM-SP machine, located at Argonne National Labs.