Improving the Average Response Time in Collective I/O

In collective I/O, MPI processes exchange requests so that the rearranged requests can result in the shortest file system access time. Scheduling the exchange sequence determines the response time of participating processes. Existing implementations that simply follow the increasing order of file offsets do not necessary produce the best performance. To minimize the average response time, we propose three scheduling algorithms that consider the number of processes per file stripe and the number of accesses per process. Our experimental results demonstrate improvements of up to 50% in the average response time using two synthetic benchmarks and a high-resolution climate application.