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

[Gus Correa]

Hi Thomas and list

You may want to try a search for appropriate keywords on
the Beowulf and ROCKS Clusters list archives:

http://www.beowulf.org/archive/index.html
http://marc.info/?l=npaci-rocks-discussion

Or ask the same question there.

I remember there was a recent discussion about this on ROCKS.
Someone in molecular dynamics with a similar problem:
need of fast/large/multiple local disk for MPI programs to use as 
temporary storage.
See this thread:

http://marc.info/?l=npaci-rocks-discussion&m=122608341608987&w=2

I hope this helps.

Gus Correa
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Gustavo J. Ponce Correa, PhD - Email: gus at ldeo.columbia.edu
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory - Columbia University
P.O. Box 1000 [61 Route 9W] - Palisades, NY, 10964-8000 - USA
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Thomas Blom wrote:

> 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