Practitioners of lattice QCD/QFT have been some of the primary pioneer users of the state-of-the-art high-performance-computing systems, and contribute towards the stress tests of such new machines as soon as they become available. As with all aspects of high-performance-computing, I/O is becoming an increasingly specialized component of these systems. In order to take advantage of the latest available high-performance I/O infrastructure, to ensure reliability and backwards compatibility of data files, and to help unify the data structures used in lattice codes, we have incorporated parallel HDF5 I/O into the SciDAC supported USQCD software stack. Here we present the design and implementation of this I/O framework. Our HDF5 implementation outperforms optimized QIO at the 10-20% level and leaves room for further improvement by utilizing appropriate dataset chunking.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1501.06992,
title = {High-Performance I/O: HDF5 for Lattice QCD},
author = {Thorsten Kurth and Andrew Pochinsky and Abhinav Sarje and Sergey Syritsyn and Andre Walker-Loud},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1501.06992},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
Contribution to the 32nd International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice 2014), 23-28 June 2014, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA