Hi Leigh,

I've actually never tried to use chunking in conjunction with
collective buffering, and it may be that it is interacting poorly with
the CB algorithm in the Cray library. I would also advise trying
contiguous storage like Quincey has suggested, or switching to
independent mode and using chunking with alignment to pad the chunks
out to stripe-width.

Mark

On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 10:41 PM, Quincey Koziol <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi Leigh,
>
> On Mar 5, 2011, at 12:49 PM, Leigh Orf wrote:
>
>> Did another test on kraken, ended up with approximately 270 MB/s
>> performance. This appears to be in line with the "baseline" results of
>> the "Tuning HDF5 for Lustre File Systems" paper. I double checked to
>> verify that I was using version 1.8.5 and have H5FD_MPIO_COLLECTIVE
>> set.
>>
>> For this particular test, I wrote 12 files spanning 30,000 cores
>> simultaneously. I watched the data come in (ls -l every 5 seconds) and
>> noticed the data came in in 'fits and starts' and towards the end of
>> the writes, only a few hundreds of bytes remained to be written, and
>> it took a long time for those bytes to get written. Something is
>> weird.
>>
>> I put some stuff on line if anyone wants to take a glance at it. The
>> output of h5stat and h5ls on one of the files is included, the output
>> of lfs getstripe is included, and a typescript file showing the ls -l
>> output every 5 seconds is included to show how the files grew over
>> time.
>>
>> You can view the files here: http://orf5.com/hdf5/kraken
>
>        Interesting...  So, your datasets are all fixed size, with no filters. 
>  If you are writing the entire dataset in one I/O operation (via collective 
> parallel I/O, or with serial I/O), you should try switching to using 
> contiguous storage for all your datasets.
>
>        Quincey
>
>> I have one question that may be at the root of this performance issue.
>> The Tuning paper talked about how chunks should be aligned. I have
>> chosen my own chunk dimensions, which are the same size as the array
>> dimensions. h5ls -rv shows that those chunk dimensions are preserved
>> (and these chunk dimensions are of course not aligned). Does this mean
>> I am overriding an internal mechanism in hdf5 which chooses its own
>> chunk dimensions based upon the lustre strip size? If I do not write
>> chunked data, will pHDF5 choose chunk dimensions for me which are
>> aligned?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Leigh
>>
>>
>> --
>> Leigh Orf
>> Associate Professor of Atmospheric Science
>> Department of Geology and Meteorology
>> Central Michigan University
>> Currently on sabbatical at the National Center for Atmospheric
>> Research in Boulder, CO
>> NCAR office phone: (303) 497-8200
>>
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>
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