[mpich-discuss] Parallel File System

[John Bent]

Excerpts from Rob Ross's message of Wed Feb 16 15:02:31 -0700 2011:
> Hi,
> 
> Real parallel I/O requires a parallel file system underneath, you
> can't just bake it into the app. You can use MPI-IO on NFS (with a
> list of caveats as long as my arm), but you really want a PFS.
> Otherwise you might as well write independent files or write only from
> rank 0.
> 
If you want to be a very ambitious guinea pig and your workload is not
O_RDWR, you could try using PLFS which converts your shared file
workload into an independent file workload.  It should give the
appearance of a parallel file system and hopefully the performance as
well without requiring a real parallel file system.  Having said this,
this is something that the PLFS team plans to investigate in the future
but that we haven't yet done so I really don't know just how ambitious
this would be.  Also, it would probably be much easier to just install
PVFS which would definitely accomplish the same thing.
-- 
Thanks,

John