As supercomputers become faster, the I/O part of applications can become a real problem in regard to overall execution times. System administrators and developers of hardware or software components reduce execution times by creating new and optimized parts for the supercomputers. While this helps a lot in the struggle to minimize I/O times, adjustment of the execution environment is not the only option to improve overall application behavior. In this paper we examine if the application programmer can also contribute by making use of non-blocking I/O operations. After an analysis of non-blocking I/O operations and their potential for shortening execution times we present a benchmark which was created and run in order to see if the theoretical promises also hold in practice.

@inproceedings{UNIOIHPCTR09,
	author	 = {David Buettner and Julian Kunkel and Thomas Ludwig},
	title	 = {{Using Non-blocking I/O Operations in High Performance Computing to Reduce Execution Times}},
	year	 = {2009},
	booktitle	 = {{Proceedings of the 16th European PVM/MPI Users' Group Meeting on Recent Advances in Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface}},
	publisher	 = {Springer-Verlag},
	address	 = {Berlin, Heidelberg},
	pages	 = {134--142},
	conference	 = {EuroPVM/MPI-09},
	organization	 = {CSC - IT},
	location	 = {Espoo, Finland},
	isbn	 = {978-3-642-03769-6},
	doi	 = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03770-2_20},
	abstract	 = {As supercomputers become faster, the I/O part of applications can become a real problem in regard to overall execution times. System administrators and developers of hardware or software components reduce execution times by creating new and optimized parts for the supercomputers. While this helps a lot in the struggle to minimize I/O times, adjustment of the execution environment is not the only option to improve overall application behavior. In this paper we examine if the application programmer can also contribute by making use of non-blocking I/O operations. After an analysis of non-blocking I/O operations and their potential for shortening execution times we present a benchmark which was created and run in order to see if the theoretical promises also hold in practice.},
	url	 = {http://www.springerlink.com/content/h7546112q656218l/fulltext.pdf},
}