Publications Details
Beyond core: Making parallel computer I/O practical
The solution of Grand Challenge Problems will require computations which are too large to fit in the memories of even the largest machines. Inevitably new designs of I/O systems will be necessary to support them. Through our implementations of an out-of-core LU factorization we have learned several important lessons about what I/O systems should be like. In particular we believe that the I/O system must provide the programmer with the ability to explicitly manage storage. One method of doing so is to have a partitioned secondary storage in which each processor owns a logical disk. Along with operating system enhancements which allow overheads such as buffer copying to be avoided, this sort of I/O system meets the needs of high performance computing.