Performance of the CM-5 Scalable File System

Assessing the performance and software interactions of emerging parallel input/output systems is a critical first step in input/output software tuning. Moreover, understanding the system response to well-understood, synthetic input /output patterns is itself a prelude to analysis of more complex application input/output patterns. We have conducted a series of experiments to measure the performance of the CM5 's new Scalable Disk Array (SDA) and Scalable Parallel File System (SFS) using the file system interfaces provided by the data parallel CM Fortran and message passing CMMD programming models. The results of these experiments suggest that the CM-5's parallel input/output system is an improvement over its predecessor, the CM-2 Data Vault. However, network bandwidth can be a bottleneck for the data reordering phase of input/output operations. 1 Introduction Despite, and because of, the enormous increases in the computation performance of recently delivered massively parallel systems..