Cadre repository on I/O information and tools expandsUrbana 20 March 2001 CADRE, a US National Science Foundation-funded facility for high-performance I/O characterisation and optimisation, announces a newly expanded repository of resources that aid in the design of efficient I/O systems. The upgrade to the Web-based CADRE repository was made possible by hardware contributions from IBM and Intel and by the addition of new software tools.
An SPII Nighthawk, donated by IBM, and a 28-node Linux cluster, donated by
Intel, are enabling CADRE to collect and distribute performance data from a
wider range of parallel systems. The Intel cluster consists of 28 933MHz
Pentium III Xeon systems, each with two 18-gigabyte disks for I/O
experiments and measurement. The Nighthawk, a two-node POWER3 SMP with
eight 375MHz RISC processors per node and a maximum memory of 64 GB, was
donated to a group of computer scientists at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign by IBM as part of its Shared University Research Program.
In addition to the new computer systems, CADRE researchers recently
released new tools that will help expand the base of empirical data in the
CADRE repository. The Pablo Performance Capture Facility (PCF) is a
cross-platform tool designed to analyse the I/O activity of application
codes running under Linux, Solaris, AIX, and IRIX.
Another new characterisation tool, the Pablo Physical I/O Tracing Facility,
reveals the correlation between application I/O requests and physical I/O
operations. This is significant because physical I/O patterns are strongly
affected by data striping mechanisms, file system policies, and disk
hardware attributes. Understanding how the operating system translates
application I/O requests into physical disk operations can aid in
optimizing file policies and data distributions for higher performance. The
initial release of the Physical I/O Facility supports Linux systems and
Linux clusters.
CADRE was launched last year as a Web-based facility that extends,
documents, archives, and disseminates software tools, sample applications,
and experimental data to stimulate research on I/O system design, analysis,
and optimisation for high-performance computing environments.
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