High Performance File I/O for the Blue Gene/L Supercomputer

Parallel I/O plays a crucial role for most data-intensive applications running on massively parallel systems like Blue Gene/L that provides the promise of delivering enormous computational capability. This paper demonstrates the impact of the high performance I/O solution for Blue Gene/L with a comprehensive evaluation that consists of a number of widely used parallel I/O benchmarks and I/O intensive applications. The design and implementation is not only able to deliver at least one order of magnitude speed up in terms of I/O bandwidth for a real-scale application HOMME, but also supports high-level parallel I/O data interfaces such as parallel HDF5 and parallel NetCDF scaling up to a large number of processors.