MPI-IO application: an implementation of a mine ventilation model

The high performance of supercomputers not only allows one to solve today problems faster but also allows one to formulate other problems, earlier not impossible to solve. However, this requires a revision of a programming model because of an increasing amount of the resulting data. MPI being a de facto a standard for distributed memory computing systems allows many options to actually program parallel I/O operations since the publication of the MPI-2 standard definition. However, such capabilities are often neglected when considering the design of applications for simulating a large problem. In this paper we describe some results of practical usage of MPI I/O in the context of gas filtration simulations through a porous mine medium. We also discuss the challenges presented by the scalability of application and performance of file subsystems and also describe how we perform a single process optimization and a parallel code optimization. All tests were run on a SKIF-Siberia computing system, a 566 CPU cluster located at Tomsk State University. This work was supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (project N 08-08-12029-ofi).