Rajive Bagrodia, Stephen Docy, and Andy Kahn
Computer Science Department
University of California
Los Angeles, CA
This paper describes the design and implementation of PIOSIM, a parallel simulation library for simulation of MPI-IO programs. We use the simulator to predict the performance of existing MPI/MPI-IO programs based on various architectural, file system, and secondary storage device characteristics. The simulator has been used as a framework to evaluate alternative caching strategies within a parallel file system and the impact of different collective I/O implementations using a real parallel I/O workload. We show the performance of the parallel execution of the simulator for three benchmark applications including the BTIO benchmark from the NAS benchmark suite. A companion paper, also submitted to this conference, describes in detail the simulation of MPI programs.