Transparent Asynchronous Parallel I/O Using Background Threads

Abstract

Moving toward exascale computing, the size of data stored and accessed by applications is ever increasing. However, traditional disk-based storage has not seen improvements that keep up with the explosion of data volume or the speed of processors. Multiple levels of non-volatile storage devices are being added to handle bursty I/O, however, moving data across the storage hierarchy can take longer than the data generation or analysis. Asynchronous I/O can reduce the impact of I/O latency as it allows applications to schedule I/O early and to check their status later. I/O is thus overlapped with application communication or computation or both, effectively hiding some or all of the I/O latency. POSIX and MPI-I/O provide asynchronous read and write operations, but lack the support for non-data operations such as file open and close. Users also have to manually manage data dependencies and use low-level byte offsets, which requires significant effort and expertise to adopt. In this article, we present an asynchronous I/O framework that supports all types of I/O operations, manages data dependencies transparently and automatically, provides implicit and explicit modes for application flexibility, and error information retrieval. We implemented these techniques in HDF5. Our evaluation of several benchmarks and application workloads demonstrates it effectiveness on hiding the I/O cost from the application.