Although there are a host of existing file system and I/O test programs available, most are not designed with parallel I/O in mind and are not useful at the scale of the clusters at Los Alamos National Lab (LANL). LANL's MPI-IO Test was written with parallel I/O and scale in mind. The MPI-IO test is built on top of MPI's I/O calls and is used to gather timing information for reading from and writing to file(s) using a variety of I/O profiles; N processes writing to N files, N processes writing to one file, N processes sending data to M processes writing to M files, or N processes sending data to M processes to one file. A data aggregation capability is available and the user can pass down MPI-IO, ROMIO and file system specific hints. The MPI-IO Test can be used for performance benchmarking and, in some cases, to diagnose problems with file systems or I/O networks.
The MPI-IO Test is open sourced under LA-CC-05-013.
Downloads:
December 15, 2006 Version Number 1.000.09 (mpi_io_test_09.tgz) and README