Identifier

etd-10312014-133428

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Computer Science

Document Type

Dissertation

Abstract

The continuing technological progress resulted in a dramatic growth in aggregate computational performance of the largest supercomputing systems. Unfortunately, these advances did not translate to the required extent into accompanying I/O systems and little more in terms of architecture or effective access latency. New classes of algorithms developed for massively parallel applications, that gracefully handle the challenges of asynchrony, heavily multi-threaded distributed codes, and message-driven computation, must be matched by similar advances in I/O methods and algorithms to produce a well performing and balanced supercomputing system. This dissertation proposes PXFS, a storage model for persistent objects inspired by the ParalleX model of execution that addresses many of these challenges. The PXFS model is designed to be asynchronous in nature to comply with ParalleX model and proposes an active TupleSpace concept to hold all kinds of metadata/meta-object for either storage objects or runtime objects. The new active TupleSpace can also register ParalleX actions to be triggered under certain tuple operations. An first implementation of PXFS utilizing a well-known Orange parallel file system as its back-end via asynchronous I/O layer and the implementation of TupleSpace component in HPX, the implementation of ParalleX. These details are also described along with the preliminary performance data. A house-made micro benchmark is developed to measure the disk I/O throughput of the PXFS asynchronous interface. The results show perfect scalability and 3x to 20x times speedup of I/O throughput performance comparing to OrangeFS synchronous user interface. Use cases of TupleSpace components are discussed for real-world applications including micro check-pointing. By utilizing TupleSpace in HPX applications for I/O, global barrier can be replaced with fine-grained parallelism to overlap more computation with communication and greatly boost the performance and efficiency. Also the dissertation showcases the distributed directory service in Orange file system which process directory entries in parallel and effectively improves the directory metada operations.

Date

2014

Document Availability at the Time of Submission

Release the entire work immediately for access worldwide.

Committee Chair

Kaiser, Hartmut

DOI

10.31390/gradschool_dissertations.2910

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