Reducing File-related Network Traffic in TreadMarks via Parallel File Input/Output

In this paper, we describe the implementation of a parallel file I/O system on TreadMarks, a page-based software Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) system built on a network of workstations. The main goal of our parallel file I/O system is to reduce filerelated network traffic in TreadMarks. This prototype employs our previously proposed variable data distribution scheme, which distributes the file blocks among the nodes according to the application’s access pattern, and delayed file access mechanism, which delays the transfer of a requested file block across the network until the block is actually used during computation. Currently, our parallel file I/O system is combined into the user-level library of TreadMarks, with minor modification of TreadMarks’ code. Due to our UNIX-like interface, the existing TreadMarks programs require very little modifications. The performance improvement of our prototype on Successive Over Relaxation is quite satisfactory while that on Matrix Multiplication is less significant.