Practical Examples for Efficient I/O on Cray XT Systems (CUG 2009)

I/O performance is limited by factors like disk bandwidth, interconnect bandwidth, and filesystem parallelism. Techniques like striping files across multiple storage targets can improve performance by respecting these limits. Interpreting complex I/O results can be challenging. Collective I/O techniques that aggregate writes from multiple processes can help scale I/O to larger problem sizes by reducing client pressure on the filesystem.