Parallel I/O Support for HPF on Computational Grids

Recently several projects have started to implement large-scale high-performance computing on “computational grids” composed of heterogeneous and geographically distributed systems of computers, networks, and storage devices that collectively act as a single “virtual supercomuter”. One of the great challenges for this environment is to provide appropriate high-level programming models. High Performance Fortran (HPF) is a language of choice for development of data parallel components of Grid applications. Another challenge is to provide efficient access to data that is distributed across local and remote Grid resources. In this paper, constructs to specify parallel input and output (I/O) operations on multidimensional arrays on the Grid in the context of HPF are proposed. The paper also presents implementation concepts that are based on the HPF compiler VFC, the parallel I/O runtime system Panda, Internet, and Grid technologies. Preliminary experimental performance results are discussed in the context of a real application example.