[mpich-discuss] Disk IO on multi-core MPI?

[Thomas Blom]

Hi,

This post may belong somewhere else, but I'm having a hard time locating
good information on disk i/o as it relates to MPI software running on
multi-core machines.

I'm in a position to influence what type of node configuration we use for a
new cluster doing bioinformatic-type work == lots of disk I/O.  It occurs to
me that multiple MPI processes running on the same multicore node may not
prove very effective if they are constantly invalidating each others' disk
cache etc...

I'm wondering about the idea of instead of a single disk for storage, using
multiple disks (e.g. 1 per core) to avoid these kinds of collisions.  Is
this a common practice?  Certainly it complicates the underlying code a
little, since core N now needs to read/write a different disk than core M on
the same machine.

There must be well-written papers about this very issue out there, but I
haven't found any yet.

thanks,
thomas blom, austin tx
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.mcs.anl.gov/pipermail/mpich-discuss/attachments/20081112/513c773b/attachment.htm>