EGU21-12209
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-12209
EGU General Assembly 2021
© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Accelerating I/O in ESMs using on demand filesystems

Stefan Versick1, Thomas Fischer2, Ole Kirner1, Tobias Meisel2, and Jörg Meyer1
Stefan Versick et al.
  • 1Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Steinbuch Centre for Computing, Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany
  • 2Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Department of Environmental Informatics, Leipzig, Germany

Earth System Models (ESM) got much more demanding over the last years. Modelled processes got more complex and more and more processes are considered in models. In addition resolutions of the models got higher to improve accuracy of predictions. This requires faster high performance computers (HPC) and better I/O performance. One way to improve I/O performance is to use faster file systems. Last year we showed the impact of the ad-hoc file system on the performance of the ESM EMAC. An ad-hoc file system is a private parallel file system which is created on-demand for an HPC job using the node-local storage devices, in our case solid-state-disks (SSD). It only exists during the runtime of the job. Therefore output data have to be moved to a permanent file system before the job has finished. Performance improvements are due to the use of SSDs in case of small chunks of I/O or a high amount of I/O operations per second. Another reason for a performace boost is because the running job can exclusively access the file system. To get a better overview in which cases ESMs benefit from using ad-hoc file systems we repeated our performance tests with further ESMs with different I/O strategies. In total we now analyzed EMAC (parallel netcdf), ICON2.5 (netcdf with asynchronous I/O), ICON2.6 (netcdf with Climate Data Interface (CDI) library) and OpenGeoSys (parallel VTU).

How to cite: Versick, S., Fischer, T., Kirner, O., Meisel, T., and Meyer, J.: Accelerating I/O in ESMs using on demand filesystems, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-12209, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-12209, 2021.

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