A software utility tool has been designed to alleviate file system I/O performance bottlenecks to which many high-end computing (HEC) applications fall prey because of the relatively large volume of data generated for a given amount of computational work. In an effort to reduce computing resource waste, and to improve sustained performance of these HEC applications, a lightweight software utility has been designed to circumvent bandwidth limitations of typical HEC file systems by exploiting the faster inter-processor bandwidth to move output data from compute nodes to designated I/O nodes as quickly as possible, thereby minimizing the I/O wait time. This utility has successfully demonstrated a significant performance improvement within a major NASA weather application.

This work was done by Thomas Clune of Goddard Space Flight Center and Shujia Zhou of Northrop Grumman. For further information, contact the Goddard Innovative Partnerships Office at (301) 286-5810. GSC-15751-1