IO Performance Testing for a Climate Modeling Application
March 12, 2009
The Visualization Group at LBL has been providing on-going support with IO and visualization strategies for Dave Randall's INCITE19 climate modeling project. Working with researchers at PNNL who are implementing a library for outputting geodesic grid data, we have uncovered several bottlenecks that lead to suboptimal parallel IO performance on Franklin, much below the system's theoretical peak. I will give an overview of the application, the layout of the data, and the visualization techniques, followed by an in-depth analysis of IO performance issues we have identified using tools such as IOR and IPM.
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About NERSC and Berkeley Lab
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is the primary high-performance computing facility for scientific research sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. Located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the NERSC Center serves more than 4,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities researching a wide range of problems in combustion, climate modeling, fusion energy, materials science, physics, chemistry, computational biology, and other disciplines. Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California for the U.S. DOE Office of Science. For more information about computing sciences at Berkeley Lab, please visit www.lbl.gov/cs.
