A comparison of logical and physical parallel I/O patterns

Abstract

Although there are several extant studies of parallel scientific application request patterns, there is little experimental data on the correlation of physical I/O patterns with application I/O stimuli. To understand these correlations, the authors have instrumented the SCSI device drivers of the Intel Paragon OSF/1 operating system to record key physical I/O activities, and have correlated this data with the I/O patterns of scientific applications captured via the Pablo analysis toolkit. This analysis shows that disk hardware features profoundly affect the distribution of request delays and that current parallel file systems respond to parallel application I/O patterns in nonscalable ways.