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uMMAP-IO: User-level Memory-mapped I/O for HPC

Introduction

The integration of local storage technologies alongside traditional parallel file systems on HPC clusters, is expected to rise the programming complexity on scientific applications aiming to take advantage of the increased-level of heterogeneity.

The User-level Memory-mapped I/O (uMMAP-IO) is a library that simplifies data management on multi-tier storage subsystems. Compared to the memory-mapped I/O mechanism of the OS, our approach features per-allocation configurable settings (e.g., segment size) and transparently enables access to a diverse range of memory and storage technologies, such as the burst buffer I/O accelerators.

See the following paper for further technical information and experimental results:

"uMMAP-IO: User-level Memory-mapped I/O for HPC"
S. Rivas-Gomez, A. Fanfarillo, S. Valat, C. Laferriere, P. Couvee, S. Narasimhamurthy, and S. Markidis.
26th IEEE International Conference on High-Performance Computing, Data, and Analytics (HiPC 2019)

How to compile and use the library

In order to compile uMMAP-IO, the src folder contains the source code and all the necessary elements. Type the following to compile both the library and a simple example application:

git clone https://github.com/sergiorg-kth/ummap-io.git
cd ummap-io/src/
make rebuild

If the compilation is successful, you will now observe inside ummap-io/ a new build/ folder that contains the following structure:

  • ummap-io/build/bin: The executable of the source code example is located here.
  • ummap-io/build/lib: Static library for uMMAP-IO, named libummapio.a. It can be utilized to compile with your code by including -lummapio. Optionally, some compilers might require -pthread -lrt as well.
  • ummap-io/build/inc: A header file, named ummap.h, is provided with the definition of the API.
  • ummap-io/build/...: Other temporary folders might be created (ignore).

The source code example can be executed directly. By default, a 1GB file will be created. You can observe whether the output was correct or not by typing the following:

> hexdump example.data
0000000 1515 1515 1515 1515 1515 1515 1515 1515
*
40000000

That is all!

Simplified API

A malloc-like interface is also available to use on the following repository:

https://github.com/sergiorg-kth/umalloc

This wrapper utilizes uMMAP-IO with certain default settings, while hiding the complexity to applications.

Known Bugs / Limitations

The implementation of uMMAP-IO contains the following known bugs and/or limitations:

  • Multi-threading is not supported. Using the library with multiple threads can produce unexpected issues, even when accessing non-overlapping areas of a mapping.
  • I/O drivers are not supported. An I/O driver abstraction could provide benefits on certain file systems (e.g., MPI-IO collective operations for large process counts). See reference paper of HiPC'19.
  • Shared compute nodes are not supported. Two different users running applications on a shared node can produce unexpected issues (i.e., uMMAP-IO calculates memory consumption assuming a single user).
  • Shared files with overlapping areas not supported. Consistency is not guaranteed when multiple processes read / write overlapping areas of a shared file.

Disclaimer

Even though the current alpha release of uMMAP-IO is relatively stable, we kindly ask you to report any issues that you might encounter on the Issues tab.