Eicker, N.FZJ* ; Isaila, F. ; Lippert, T.FZJ* ; Moschny, T. ; Tichy, W. F.

2004
Elsevier Amsterdam [u.a.]

Abstract: We have demonstrated that the ParaStation3 communication system speeds up the performance of parallel I/O on cluster computers such as ALiCE. I/O benchmarks with PVFS using Parastation over Myrinet achieve a throughput for write operations of up to 1 GB/s from a 32-processor compute partition, given a 32-processor PVFS I/O partition. These results outperform known benchmark results for PVFS on 1.28 Gbit Myrinet by more than a factor of 2, a fact that is mainly due to the superior communication features of ParaStation. Read performance from buffer cache reaches up to 2.2 GB/s, while reading from hard disk saturates at the cumulative hard disk performance. The I/O performance achieved with PVFS using ParaStation enables us to carry out extremely data-intensive eigenmode computations on ALiCE in the application field of lattice quantum chromodynamics. For the future, we plan to utilize the I/O system for storing and processing mass data in high energy physics data analysis on clusters.