Achieving Computational I/O Efciency in a High Performance Cluster Using Multicore Processors

Cluster computing has become one of the most pop-ular platforms for high-performance computing today. The recent popularity of multicore processors provides a exible way to increase the computational capabil-ity of clusters. Although the system performance may improve with multicore processors in a cluster, I/O requests initiated by multiple cores may saturate the I/O bus, and furthermore increase the latency by issu-ing multiple non-contiguous disk accesses. In this pa-per, we propose an asymmetric collective I/O for mul-ticore processors to improve multiple non-contiguous accesses. In our conguration, one core in each mul-ticore processor is designated as the coordinator, and others serve as computing cores. The coordinator is responsible for aggregating I/O operations from com-puting cores and submitting a contiguous request. The coordinator allocates contiguous memory buffers on behalf of other cores to avoid redundant data copies