A Checkpoint of Research on Parallel I/O for High-Performance Computing

We present a comprehensive survey on parallel I/O in the high-performance computing (HPC) context. This is an important field for HPC because of the historic gap between processing power and storage latency, which causes application performance to be impaired when accessing or generating large amounts of data. As the available processing power and amount of data increase, I/O remains a central issue for the scientific community. In this survey article, we focus on a traditional I/O stack, with a POSIX parallel file system. We present background concepts everyone could benefit from. Moreover, through the comprehensive study of publications from the most important conferences and journals in a 5-year time window, we discuss the state of the art in I/O optimization approaches, access pattern extraction techniques, and performance modeling, in addition to general aspects of parallel I/O research. With this approach, we aim at identifying the general characteristics of the field and the main current and future research topics.