| Exploring the use of I/O nodes for computation in a MIMD multiprocessor (1995) | |||||||||||||||
Abstract | |||||||||||||||
| As parallel systems move into the production scienti c-computing world, the emphasis will be on cost-e ective solutions that provide high throughput for a mix of applications. Coste ective solutions demand that a system make e ective use of all of its resources. Many MIMD multiprocessors today, however, distinguish between \compute " and \I/O " nodes, the latter having attached disks and being dedicated to running the le-system server. This static division of responsibilities simpli es system management but does not necessarily lead to the best performance in workloads that need a di erent balance of computation and I/O. Of course, computational processes sharing a node with a le-system service may receive less CPU time, network bandwidth, and memory bandwidth than they would on a computationonly node. In this paper we begin to examine this issue experimentally. We found that highperformance I/O does not necessarily require substantial CPU time, leaving plenty of time for application computation. There were some complex le-system requests, however, which left little CPU time available to the application. (The impact on network and memory bandwidth still needs to be determined.) For applications (or users) that cannot tolerate an occasional interruption, we recommend that they continue to use only compute nodes. For tolerant applications needing more cycles than those provided by the compute nodes, we recommend that they take full advantage of both compute and I/O nodes for computation, and that operating systems should make this possible. 1 | |||||||||||||||
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