Automatic parallel I/O performance optimization using genetic algorithms

Abstract

The complexity of parallel I/O systems imposes significant challenge in managing and utilizing the available system resources to meet application performance, portability and usability goals. We believe that a parallel I/O system that automatically selects efficient I/O plans for user applications is a solution to this problem. We present such an automatic performance optimization approach for scientific applications performing collective I/O requests on multidimensional arrays. The approach is based on a high level description of the target workload and execution environment characteristics, and applies genetic algorithms to select high quality I/O plans. We have validated this approach in the Panda, parallel I/O library. Our performance evaluations on the IBM SP show that this approach can select high quality I/O plans under a variety of system conditions with a low overhead, and the genetic algorithm-selected I/O plans are in general better than the default plans used in Panda.