PART: A Run-Time Library for Tape-Resident Data
Gokhan Memik, Mahmut Taylan Kandemir, Alok Choudhary, and Valerie E. Taylor
Abstract
Over the last decade, processors have made enormous gains in
speed. But increase
in the speed of the secondary and tertiary storage devices could not
cope with these gains. The result is that the secondary and tertiary
storage access times dominate execution time of data intensive
computations. Therefore, in scientific
computations, efficient data access functionality for data stored in
secondary and tertiary storage is a must. In this extended abstract,
we give an overview o f PART, a runtime library that can be used in
applications that process tape-res ident data. We present user
interface and underlying optimization strategy. We a lso discuss
performance improvements provided by the library on the High Perform
ance Storage System (HPSS). The preliminary results reveal that the
optimization s can improve response times by up to 97:2%.