ABT-IO

ABT-IO is a Mochi library that provides wrappers for conventional POSIX I/O functions. The wrappers are prefixed with abt_io_ as in abt_io_open(), abt_io_read(), and abt_io_write(). These wrapper functions have the same arguments and semantics as their POSIX counterparts, except that the underlying I/O operations are offloaded to internal resources to be executed asynchronously. ABT-IO presents both a blocking API and a non-blocking API to callers. In the former case, the calling thread is suspended so that other user-level threads may gracefully execute until the I/O operation is complete.

Rationale

Executing I/O operations (read(), write(), etc.) directly from within an Argobots user-level thread (ULT) is technically legal but will block the underlying execution stream (ES) until the I/O operation has completed. This is problematic (e.g., it may limit concurrency, produce excessive latency, or even cause deadlock) if the ES is expected to execute other cooperatively-scheduled code. In Mochi for example, an ES is likely to be responsible for executing multiple RPC handlers or communication progress loops, and those capabilities will be starved while the ES is blocked awaiting completion of an I/O system call.

ABT-IO was developed specifically to address this problem. It creates one or more decoupled execution streams to which I/O operations are delegated so they can be executed there on behalf of the caller without perturbing the caller’s user-level thread scheduling. This also enables I/O concurrency to be tuned independently from the caller’s level of execution concurrency.

ABT-IO may also optionally be configured to use io_uring on supported platforms to further accelerate I/O performance.

ABT-IO Usage

This section gives a list of tutorials on how to use ABT-IO.