Paper Info
Title
Implementing MPI-IO Atomic Mode and Shared File Pointers Using MPI One-Sided Communication
Abstract
The ROMIO implementation of the MPI-IO standard provides a portable infrastructure for use on top of a variety of underlying storage targets. These targets vary widely in their capabilities, and in some cases additional effort is needed within ROMIO to support all MPI-IO semantics. Two aspects of the interface that can be problematic to implement are MPI-IO atomic mode and the shared file pointer access routines. Atomic mode requires enforcing strict consistency semantics, and shared file pointer routines require communication and coordination in order to atomically update a shared resource. For some file systems, native locks may be used to implement these features, but not all file systems have lock support. In this work, we describe algorithms for implementing efficient mutex locks using MPI-1 and the one-sided capabilities from MPI-2. We then show how these algorithms may be used to implement both MPI-IO atomic mode and shared file pointer methods for ROMIO without requiring any features from the underlying file system. We show that these algorithms can outperform traditional file system lock approaches. Because of the portable nature of these algorithms, they are likely useful in a variety of situations where distributed locking or coordination is needed in the MPI-2 environment.
Year
DOI
Venue
2007
10.1177/1094342007077859
IJHPCA
Keywords
DocType
Volume
mpi-io standard,shared file pointer routine,file system,mpi-io semantics,implementing mpi-io atomic mode,underlying file system,shared file pointer access,shared file pointer method,shared file,mpi-io atomic mode,atomic mode,traditional file system lock,mpi one-sided communication,implementation,message passing
Journal
21
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
2
1094-3420
11
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.92
12
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Robert Latham11348.57
Robert Ross22717173.13
Rajeev Thakur33773251.09