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. 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 timestep/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.