2002_03-03-21_post.html ¤º–<)º–<)-’ Department of Computer Science Colloquia -- Announcement

NC State University

Department of Computer Science Colloquia 2002-2003

Date:   Friday, March 21, 2003
Time:   3:30 PM (Talk)
Place:   2431, College of Textiles, NCSU Centennial Campus (click for courtesy parking request)

Speaker:   Xiaosong Ma , University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Hiding Periodic I/O Costs in Parallel Applications

Abstract:   Today's parallel computer systems provide people with ever-increasing resources to perform large computations. However, the performance and parallelism provided by different system components are not all improving at the same rate, making flexible and automated performance optimization and tuning highly desirable, especially for large-scale, complex applications. In this talk, I will present adaptive performance optimizations to reduce the visible cost of periodic I/O in scientific simulations.

In contrast to most previous studies on improving parallel I/O throughput, approaches presented in this talk recognize the growing performance gap between the I/O system and other system components, and try to *hide* the I/O costs rather than to speed up the reads and writes. I will describe a flexible buffering scheme that utilizes idle resources in the system to promote the overlap between I/O and computation. It adapts automatically to runtime resource availability and individual applications' I/O behavior, and works on top of multiple parallel I/O architectures and scientific data formats. I will also briefly present a data management framework for visualization tools, which combines scientific data query facilities with high-level prefetching and caching schemes. I will demonstrate benefits of the above solutions through their impact on real-world applications' performance and talk about ongoing work on transferring these techniques to widely-used I/O libraries.

Short Bio:   Xiaosong Ma is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests are in the areas of storage systems, parallel I/O, high-performance parallel computing, and self-configurable performance optimization. She received a B.S. in computer science from Peking University in China.

Hosts:   Robert Fornaro and Mladen Vouk, Computer Science, NCSU

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