Abstract
This article analyzes the impact of different solutions of I/O performance problem on Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulation. MD accesses data in a non-contiguous way, with unpredictable patterns that change as the simulation progresses. Such application drastically affect the performance of Parallel File Systems. We show that there is a strong relation between the distribution of the atoms on the simulation space and MD I/O performance. We propose a variant of data sieving approach that uses the symmetry of the MD’s access pattern to minimize the number of I/O operations, and behaves considerably better than other tested solutions.
This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science under the TIN2004-02156 contract.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Carns, P., Ligon, W., Ross, R., Thakur, R.: PVFS: A Parallel File System for Linux Clusters. In: Proc. of the Extreme Linux Track: 4th Annual Linux Showcase and Conference, pp. 317–327 (2000)
Ching, A., Choudhary, A., Liao, W.: Noncontiguous I/O through PVFS. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing, pp. 405–414 (2002)
Ching, A., Choudhary, A., Coloma, K., Liao, W.: Noncontiguous I/O Accesses Through MPI-IO. In: Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid, pp. 104–111 (2003)
Mellor-Crummey, J., Whalley, D., Kennedy, K.: Improving Memory Hierarchy Performance for Irregular Applications. In: Proceedings of the International Conference of Supercomputing, pp. 425–433 (1999)
Plimpton, S.: Fast Parallel Algorithms for Short–Range Molecular Dynamics. Journal of Computational Physics 117, 1–19 (1995)
Thakur, R., Choudhary, R., Borawekar, R., More, S., Kuditipudi, S.: Passion: Optimized I/O for Parallel Applications. IEEE Computer 29(6), 70–78 (1996)
Thakur, R., Gropp, W., Lusk, E.: Data Sieving and Collective I/O in ROMIO. In: Proc. of the 7th Symposium on the Frontiers of Massively Parallel Computation, pp. 182–189 (1999)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Ibáñez, M.B., García, F., Carretero, J. (2005). Symmetrical Data Sieving for Noncontiguous I/O Accesses in Molecular Dynamics Simulations. In: Di Martino, B., Kranzlmüller, D., Dongarra, J. (eds) Recent Advances in Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface. EuroPVM/MPI 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3666. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11557265_56
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11557265_56
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-29009-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31943-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)