Performance evaluation of a parallel I/O architecture

Presented are the results of a study conducted to evaluate the performance of parallel I/O on a massively parallel processor (MPP). The network traversal and total processing times are calculated for I/O reads and writes while varying the I/O and non-I/O request rates and the request size. Also studied is the performance impact of I/O and non-I/O traffic on each other. The results show that the system is scalable for I/O loads considered; however, the scalability is limited by I/O node saturation or considerable network contention.