Document Type

Article

Date

1998

Keywords

out-of-core, data-parallelism, I/O, optimizing compilers, distributed-memory machines

Language

English

Disciplines

Computer Engineering

Description/Abstract

The difficulty of handling out-of-core data limits the performance of supercomputers as well as the potential of the parallel machines. Since writing an efficient out-of-core version of a program is a difficult task and virtual memory systems do not perform well on scientific computations, we believe that there is a clear need for compiler directed explicit I/O approach for out-of-core computations. In this paper, we first present an out-of-core compilation strategy based on a disk storage abstraction. Then we offer a compiler algorithm to optimize locality of disk accesses in out-of core codes by choosing a good combination of file layouts on disks and loop transformations. We introduce memory coefficient and processor coefficient concepts to characterize the behavior of out-of-core programs under different memory constraints. We also enhance our algorithm to handle data-parallel programs which contain multiple loop nest. Our initial experimental results obtained on IBM SP-2 and Intel Paragon provide encouraging evidence that our approach is successful at optimizing programs which depend on disk-resident data in distributed-memory machines.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

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