Assessing the performance and software interactions of emerging parallel input/output systems is a critical first step in input/output software tuning. Moreover, understanding the system response to well-understood, synthetic input/output patterns is itself a prelude to analysis of more complex application input/output patterns. We have conducted a series of experiments to measure the performance of the CM-5's new Scalable Disk Array (SDA) and Scalable Parallel File System (SFS) using the file system interfaces provided by the data parallel CM Fortran and message passing CMMD programming models. The results of these experiments suggest that the CM-5's parallel input/output systems is an improvement over its predecessor, the CM-2 Data Vault. However, network bandwidth can be a bottleneck for the data reordering phase of input/output operations.

Article Experiments with a gigabit neuroscience application on the CM-2 Share on Authors: T. T. Kwan National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois, Urbana, IllinoisView Profile , J. A. Terstriep National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois, Urbana, IllinoisView Profile Authors Info & Claims Supercomputing '93: Proceedings of the 1993 ACM/IEEE conference on SupercomputingDecember 1993 Pages 133–142https://doi.org/10.1145/169627.169671Online:01 December 1993Publication History 2citation122DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations2Total Downloads122Last 12 Months1Last 6 weeks1 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

The Thinking Machines CM-5 is one of the first of a new generation of massively parallel systems.To assess the scalability of the CM-5's computation and interprocessor communication rates, we used a sem"es of benchmarks to measure the performance of the CM-5 data and control networks, the node vector units, and the balance of computation and communication.At the application level, we found the achievable communication bandwidth and processing rates to be roughly fifiy percent and forty percent, respectively, of the corresponding theoretical peak rates.Our early assessment is that the CM-5 is scalable but that a better balance of communication and processing rates would increase its effectiveness. 1