Scalable Implementations of MPI Atomicity for Concurrent Overlapping I/O

Wei-keng Liao, Alok Choudhary, Kenin Coloma, George K. Thiruvathukal, Lee Ward, Eric Russell, Neil Pundit

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

For concurrent I/O operations, atomicity defines the results in the overlapping file regions simultaneously read/written by requesting processes. Atomicity has been well studied at the file system level, such as POSIX standard. In this paper, we investigate the problems arising from the implementation of MPI atomicity for concurrent overlapping write access and provide a few programming solutions. Since the MPI definition of atomicity differs from the POSIX one, an implementation that simply relies on the POSIX file systems does not guarantee correct MPI semantics. To have a correct implementation of atomic I/O in MPI, we examine the efficiency of three approaches: 1) file locking, 2) graph-coloring, and 3) process-rank ordering. Performance complexity for these methods are analyzed and their experimental results are presented for file systems including NFS, SGI’s XFS, and IBM’s GPFS.

Original languageAmerican English
JournalComputer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 1 2003

Keywords

  • I/O
  • computer science
  • data

Disciplines

  • Computer and Systems Architecture
  • Computer Sciences
  • Data Storage Systems

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