Automatic Generation of I/O Kernels for HPC Applications

Abstract

The study of the I/O performance of a parallel application can be facilitated by the use of an I/O kernel -- a program that generates the same I/O calls as the original application, but can be executed much faster. Such I/O kernels are especially important when the programs under study are proprietary or classified, and only available in binary form.In this paper, we show how to create automatically such an I/O kernel, by executing the target application with an instrumented I/O library, next "compressing" the resulting I/O traces into a compact C program that generates those traces.