Efficient I/O of grid hierarchies for AMR computations on parallel disks

Adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) is a promising computational approach that investigates a scientific problem using grids of different resolutions in different portions of the problem space. This allows the more `interesting' areas of the problem space to be investigated in more detail than other areas. In this paper, we present efficient ways for AMR-type applications to do input/output on the IBM SP2. We propose a disk layout that minimizes I/O costs for checkpoint/restart operations and investigate several allocation approaches to decluster grid data to multiple disks to enhance I/O parallelism for time step/visualization operations. The experiments on the SP2 show that our strategies can help to shorten the I/O time to meet the performance requirements of the two types of I/O operations.