Publications

M. Henderson, W. Nickless, and R. Stevens, "A Scalable High–Performance I/O System," In Scalable High-Performance Computing Conference, Knoxville, TN, 1969, pp. 79-86, .

A significant weakness of many existing parallel supercomputers is their lack of high-performance parallel I/O. This weakness has prevented, in many cases, the full exploitation of the true potential of MPP systems. As part of a joint project with IBM, we have designed a parallel I/O system for an IBM SP system that can provide sustained I/O rates of greater than 160 MB/s from collections of compute nodes to archival disk and peak transfer rates that should exceed 400 MB/s from compute nodes to I/O servers. This testbed system will be used for a number of projects. First, it will provide a high-performance experimental I/O system for traditional computational science applications; second, it will be used as an I/O software and development environment for new parallel I/O algorithms and operating systems support; and third, it will be used as the foundation for a number of new projects designed to develop enabling technology for the National Information Infrastructure. This report descr...