A Solution to Image Processing with Parallel MPI I/O and Distributed NVRAM Cache

Abstract

The paper presents a new approach to parallel image processing using byte addressable, non-volatile memory (NVRAM). We show that our custom built MPI I/O implementation of selected functions that use a distributed cache that incorporates NVRAMs located in cluster nodes can be used for efficient processing of large images. We demonstrate performance benefits of such a solution compared to a traditional implementation without NVRAM for various sizes of buffers used to read image parts, process and write back to storage. We also show that our implementation benefits from overlapping reading subsequent images while processing already loaded ones. We present results obtained in a cluster environment for three parallel implementation of blur, multipass blur and Sobel filters, for various NVRAM parameters such as latencies and bandwidth values.