Work

MPI‐Based Approaches to Overlap Computation and I/O in Geophysical Simulations

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: ABSTRACT Geophysical simulations, such as wave propagation, are often constrained by I/O bottlenecks, where a significant portion of the execution time is spent writing data to disk. This process frequently leaves expensive computational resources, such as GPUs, idle, directly impacting both performance and energy consumption. This work investigates strategies to mitigate this bottleneck in a wave propagation application by overlapping computation with I/O. Starting from a naive implementation, we design and evaluate four distinct approaches using MPI: A simple blocking send (Blocking), a non‐blocking variant (Non‐blocking), a dynamic process model that spawns writers for separate files (SpawnSplitFiles), and a similar dynamic model using MPI‐IO to write to a single file (SpawnMPI‐IO). We evaluate these strategies across four diverse hardware architectures. Our results demonstrate that overlapping techniques yield substantial improvements. Specifically, the SpawnSplitFiles strategy proved most effective, achieving a speedup of up to 1.85 while using 35% less energy on the NVIDIA Grace Superchip machine compared to the baseline.

Source: Concurrency and Computation Practice and Experience

DOI: 10.1002/cpe.70694

Authors: Rodrigo C. Machado, Arthur F. Lorenzon, Philippe O. A. Navaux

Institution: Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

Language: English

Topic: Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques

Subfield: Hardware and Architecture

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $5,140

Funders: Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico, Petrobras, Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul