Exploring MPI Collective I/O and File-per-process I/O for Checkpointing a Logical Inference Task

Ke Fan, Kristopher Micinski, Thomas Gilray, Sidharth Kumar

Research output: Chapter in Book/Entry/PoemConference contribution

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

We present a scalable parallel I/O system for a logical-inferencing application built atop a deductive database. Deductive databases can make logical deductions (i.e. conclude additional facts), based on a set of program rules, derived from facts already in the database. Datalog is a language or family of languages commonly used to specify rules and queries for a deductive database. Applications built using Datalog can range from graph mining (such as computing transitive closure or k-cliques) to program analysis (control and data-flow analysis). In our previous papers, we presented the first implementation of a data-parallel Datalog built using MPI. In this paper, we present a parallel I/O system used to checkpoint and restart applications built on top of our Datalog system. State of the art Datalog implementations, such as Soufflé, only support serial I/O, mainly because the implementation itself does not support many-node parallel execution.Computing the transitive closure of a graph is one of the simplest logical-inferencing applications built using Datalog; we use it as a micro-benchmark to demonstrate the efficacy of our parallel I/O system. Internally, we use a nested B-tree data-structure to facilitate fast and efficient in-memory access to relational data. Our I/O system therefore involves two steps, converting the application data-layout (a nested B-tree) to a stream of bytes followed by the actual parallel I/O. We explore two popular I/O techniques POSIX I/O and MPI collective I/O. For extracting performance out of MPI Collective I/O we use adaptive striping, and for POSIX I/O we use file-per-process I/O. We demonstrate the scalability of our system at up to 4, 096 processes on the Theta supercomputer at the Argonne National Laboratory.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2021 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops, IPDPSW 2021 - In conjunction with IEEE IPDPS 2021
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages965-972
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9781665435772
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 2021
Event2021 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops, IPDPSW 2021 - Virtual, Portland, United States
Duration: May 17 2021 → …

Publication series

Name2021 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops, IPDPSW 2021 - In conjunction with IEEE IPDPS 2021

Conference

Conference2021 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops, IPDPSW 2021
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityVirtual, Portland
Period5/17/21 → …

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Information Systems

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