ADIOS1 Backend

openPMD supports writing to and reading from ADIOS1 .bp files. For this, the installed copy of openPMD must have been built with support for the ADIOS1 backend. To build openPMD with support for ADIOS, use the CMake option -DopenPMD_USE_ADIOS1=ON. For further information, check out the installation guide, build dependencies and the build options.

I/O Method

ADIOS1 has several staging methods for alternative file formats, yet natively writes to .bp files. We currently implement the MPI_AGGREGATE transport method for MPI-parallel write (POSIX for serial write) and ADIOS_READ_METHOD_BP for read.

Backend-Specific Controls

The following environment variables control ADIOS1 I/O behavior at runtime. Fine-tuning these is especially useful when running at large scale.

environment variable default description
OPENPMD_ADIOS_NUM_AGGREGATORS 1 Number of I/O aggregator nodes for ADIOS1 MPI_AGGREGATE transport method.
OPENPMD_ADIOS_NUM_OST 0 Number of I/O OSTs for ADIOS1 MPI_AGGREGATE transport method.
OPENPMD_ADIOS_HAVE_METADATA_FILE 1 Online creation of the adios journal file (1: yes, 0: no).

Please refer to the ADIOS1 manual, section 6.1.5 for details.

Best Practice at Large Scale

A good practice at scale is to disable the online creation of the metadata file. After writing the data, run bpmeta on the (to-be-created) filename to generate the metadata file offline (repeat per iteration for file-based encoding). This metadata file is needed for reading, while the actual heavy data resides in <metadata filename>.dir/ directories.

Further options depend heavily on filesystem type, specific file striping, network infrastructure and available RAM on the aggregator nodes. If your filesystem exposes explicit object-storage-targets (OSTs), such as Lustre, try to set the number of OSTs to the maximum number available and allowed per job (e.g. non-full), assuming the number of writing MPI ranks is larger. A good number for aggregators is usually the number of contributing nodes divided by four.

For fine-tuning at extreme scale or for exotic systems, please refer to the ADIOS1 manual and talk to your filesystem admins and the ADIOS1 authors. Be aware that extreme-sale I/O is a research topic after all.

Selected References

  • Hasan Abbasi, Matthew Wolf, Greg Eisenhauer, Scott Klasky, Karsten Schwan, and Fang Zheng. Datastager: scalable data staging services for petascale applications, Cluster Computing, 13(3):277–290, 2010. DOI:10.1007/s10586-010-0135-6
  • Ciprian Docan, Manish Parashar, and Scott Klasky. DataSpaces: An interaction and coordination framework or coupled simulation workflows, In Proc. of 19th International Symposium on High Performance and Distributed Computing (HPDC’10), June 2010. DOI:10.1007/s10586-011-0162-y
  • Qing Liu, Jeremy Logan, Yuan Tian, Hasan Abbasi, Norbert Podhorszki, Jong Youl Choi, Scott Klasky, Roselyne Tchoua, Jay Lofstead, Ron Oldfield, Manish Parashar, Nagiza Samatova, Karsten Schwan, Arie Shoshani, Matthew Wolf, Kesheng Wu, and Weikuan Yu. Hello ADIOS: the challenges and lessons of developing leadership class I/O frameworks, Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 26(7):1453–1473, 2014. DOI:10.1002/cpe.3125
  • Robert McLay, Doug James, Si Liu, John Cazes, and William Barth. A user-friendly approach for tuning parallel file operations, In Proceedings of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, SC‘14, pages 229–236, IEEE Press, 2014. DOI:10.1109/SC.2014.24
  • Axel Huebl, Rene Widera, Felix Schmitt, Alexander Matthes, Norbert Podhorszki, Jong Youl Choi, Scott Klasky, and Michael Bussmann. On the Scalability of Data Reduction Techniques in Current and Upcoming HPC Systems from an Application Perspective, ISC High Performance 2017: High Performance Computing, pp. 15-29, 2017. arXiv:1706.00522, DOI:10.1007/978-3-319-67630-2_2