Design and Development of a Java Parallel I/O Library

Abstract

Parallel I/O refers to the ability of scientific programs to concurrently read/write from/to a single file from multiple processes executing on distributed memory platforms like compute clusters. In the HPC world, I/O becomes a significant bottleneck for many real-world scientific applications. In the last two decades, there has been significant research in improving the performance of I/O operations in scientific computing for traditional languages including C, C++, and Fortran. As a result of this, several mature and high-performance libraries including ROMIO (implementation of MPI-IO), parallel HDF5, Parallel I/O (PIO), and parallel netCDF are available today that provide efficient I/O for scientific applications. However, there is very little research done to evaluate and improve I/O performance of Java-based HPC applications. The main hindrance in the development of efficient parallel I/O Java libraries is the lack of a standard API (something equivalent to MPI-IO). Some adhoc solutions have been developed and used in proprietary applications, but there is no general-purpose solution that can be used by performance hungry applications. As part of this project, we plan to develop a Java-based parallel I/O API inspired by the MPI-IO bindings (MPI 2.0 standard document) for C, C++, and Fortran. Once the Java equivalent API of MPI-IO has been developed, we will develop a reference implementation on top of existing Java messaging libraries. Later, we will evaluate and compare performance of our reference Java Parallel I/O library with C/C++ counterparts using benchmarks and real-world applications.