%T File-Access Characteristics of Parallel Scientific Workloads
%A Nils Nieuwejaar
%A David Kotz
%A Apratim Purakayastha
%A Carla Schlatter Ellis
%A Michael Best
%R Technical Report PCS-TR95-263
%I Dartmouth College, Computer Science
%C Hanover, NH
%D August 1995
%U http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR95-263.ps.Z
%X
   Phenomenal improvements in the computational performance of
 multiprocessors have not been matched by comparable gains in I/O system
 performance.  This imbalance has resulted in I/O becoming a significant
 bottleneck for many scientific applications. One key to overcoming this
 bottleneck is improving the performance of parallel file systems.
   The design of a high-performance parallel file system requires a
 comprehensive understanding of the expected workload. Unfortunately,
 until recently, no general workload studies of parallel file systems
 have been conducted.  The goal of the CHARISMA project was to remedy
 this problem by characterizing the behavior of several production
 workloads, on different machines, at the level of individual reads and
 writes.  The first set of results from the CHARISMA project describe
 the workloads observed on an Intel iPSC/860 and a Thinking Machines
 CM-5. This paper is intended to compare and contrast these two
 workloads for an understanding of their essential similarities and
 differences, isolating common trends and platform-dependent variances.
 Using this comparison, we are able to gain more insight into the
 general principles that should guide parallel file-system design.
%Z
 See also the related papers from
 <A HREF="/~dfk/papers/workload.html">Supercomputing '94</A>,
 <A HREF="/~dfk/papers/jworkload.html">IEEE Parallel and Distributed Technology</A>, and 
 <A HREF="/~dfk/papers/ap-workload.html">IPPS '95</A>