Effective file-I/O bandwidth benchmark

Abstract

The effective I/O bandwidth benchmark (beffio) covers two goals: (1) to achieve a characteristic average number for the I/O bandwidth achievable with parallel MPI-I/O applications, and (2) to get detailed information about several access patterns and buffer lengths. The benchmark examines “first write”, “rewrite” and “read” access, strided (individual and shared pointers) and segmented collective patterns on one file per application and non-collective access to one file per process. The number of parallel accessing processes is also varied and wellformed I/O is compared with non-wellformed. On systems, meeting the rule that the total memory can be written to disk in 10 minutes, the benchmark should not need more than 15 minutes for a first pass of all patterns. The benchmark is designed analogously to the effective bandwidth benchmark for message passing (beff) that characterizes the message passing capabilities of a system in a few minutes. First results of the beffio benchmark are given for IBM SP, Cray T3E and NEC SX-5 systems and compared with existing benchmarks based on parallel Posix-I/O.