University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Panda: Fast access to persistent arrays using high-level interfaces and server directed input/output

Seamons, Kent Eldon

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/22649

Description

Title
Panda: Fast access to persistent arrays using high-level interfaces and server directed input/output
Author(s)
Seamons, Kent Eldon
Issue Date
1996
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Winslett, Marianne
Department of Study
Computer Science
Discipline
Computer Science
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
  • Engineering, System Science
  • Computer Science
Language
eng
Abstract
  • Multidimensional arrays are a fundamental data type in scientific computing and are used extensively across a broad range of applications. Often these arrays are persistent, i.e., they outlive the invocation of the program that created them. Portability and performance with respect to input and output (i/o) pose significant challenges to applications accessing large persistent arrays, especially in distributed-memory environments. A significant number of scientific applications perform conceptually simple array i/o operations, such as reading or writing a subarray, an entire array, or a list of arrays. However, the algorithms to perform these operations efficiently on a given platform may be complex and non-portable, and may require costly customizations to operating system software.
  • This thesis presents a high-level interface for array i/o and three implementation architectures, embodied in the Panda (Persistence AND Arrays) array i/o library. The high-level interface contributes to application portability, by encapsulating unnecessary details and being easy to use. Performance results using Panda demonstrate that an i/o system can provide application programs with a high-level, portable, easy-to-use interface for array i/o without sacrificing performance or requiring custom system software; in fact, combining all these benefits may only be possible through a high-level interface due to the great freedom and flexibility a high-level interface provides for the underlying implementation.
  • The Panda server-directed i/o architecture is a prime example of an efficient implementation of collective array i/o for closely synchronized applications in distributed-memory single-program multiple-data (SPMD) environments. A high-level interface is instrumental to the good performance of server-directed i/o, since it provides a global view of an upcoming collective i/o operation that Panda uses to plan sequential reads and writes. Performance results show that with server-directed i/o, Panda achieves throughputs close to the maximum AIX file system throughput on the i/o nodes of the IBM SP2 when reading and writing large multidimensional arrays.
Type of Resource
text
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/22649
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 1996 Seamons, Kent Eldon

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Graduate Dissertations and Theses at Illinois PRIMARY
Graduate Theses and Dissertations at Illinois
Dissertations and Theses - Computer Science
Dissertations and Theses from the Dept. of Computer Science