[petsc-users] Binary I/O

[Barry Smith]

On Oct 12, 2011, at 5:42 PM, Mohamad M. Nasr-Azadani wrote:

> Hi everyone, 
> 
> I think I know the answer to my question, but I was double checking. 
> When using 
> PetscViewerBinaryOpen(); 
> 
> It is mentioned that 
> "For writing files it only opens the file on processor 0 in the communicator."
> 
> Does that mean when writing a parallel vector to file using VecView(), all the data from other processors is first sent to processor zero and then dumped into the file? 

   No all the data is not sent to process zero before writing. That is process 0 does not need enough memory to store all the data before writing. 

    Instead the processes take turns sending data to process 0 who immediately writes it out out to disk. 

> If so, that would be a very slow processor for big datasets and large number of processor? 

   For less than a few thousand processes this is completely fine and nothing else would be much faster

> Any suggestions to speed that process up? 

   We have the various MPI IO options that uses MPI IO to have several processes writing to disks at the same time that is useful for very large numbers of processes.

   Barry

> 
> Best, 
> Mohamad
>