IOPA: I/O-aware parallelism adaption for parallel programs

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 12; no. 3; p. e0173038
• Main Authors: Liu, Tao, Liu, Yi, Qian, Chen, Qian, Depei
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 09.03.2017; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Algorithms; Architectural engineering; Architecture; Bandwidths; Computer and Information Sciences; Computers; Data processing; Dental radiography; Disk drives; Efficiency; Engineering and Technology; International conferences; Microprocessors; Parallel programming; Parallel programming (Computer science); Physical Sciences; Processors; Programmers; Research and Analysis Methods; Resource utilization; Servers; Software
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0173038

With the development of multi-/many-core processors, applications need to be written as parallel programs to improve execution efficiency. For data-intensive applications that use multiple threads to read/write files simultaneously, an I/O sub-system can easily become a bottleneck when too many of these types of threads exist; on the contrary, too few threads will cause insufficient resource utilization and hurt performance. Therefore, programmers must pay much attention to parallelism control to find the appropriate number of I/O threads for an application. This paper proposes a parallelism control mechanism named IOPA that can adjust the parallelism of applications to adapt to the I/O capability of a system and balance computing resources and I/O bandwidth. The programming interface of IOPA is also provided to programmers to simplify parallel programming. IOPA is evaluated using multiple applications with both solid state and hard disk drives. The results show that the parallel applications using IOPA can achieve higher efficiency than those with a fixed number of threads.