turned up problems on the BlueWaters Cray.
Gets 75MB/s from home filesystem on parallel configuration read. Need to make the RNG IO parallel,
and also to look at aggregating bigger writes for the parallel write.
Not sure what the home filesystem is.
Not really shaken out to my satisfaction though as I want more tests done, so don't declare as working.
But committing my current while I try a few experimentals.
Number of IO MPI tasks can be varied by selecting which
dimensions use parallel IO and which dimensions use Serial send to boss
I/O.
Thus can neck down from, say 1024 nodes = 4x4x8x8 to {1,8,32,64,128,256,1024} nodes
doing the I/O.
Interpolates nicely between ALL nodes write their data, a single boss per time-plane
in processor space [old UKQCD fortran code did this], and a single node doing all I/O.
Not sure I have the transfer sizes big enough and am not overly convinced fstream
is guaranteed to not give buffer inconsistencies unless I set streambuf size to zero.
Practically it has worked on 8 tasks, 2x1x2x2 writing /cloning NERSC configurations
on my MacOS + OpenMPI and Clang environment.
It is VERY easy to switch to pwrite at a later date, and also easy to send x-strips around from
each node in order to gather bigger chunks at the syscall level.
That would push us up to the circa 8x 18*4*8 == 4KB size write chunk, and by taking, say, x/y non
parallel we get to 16MB contiguous chunks written in multi 4KB transactions
per IOnode in 64^3 lattices for configuration I/O.
I suspect this is fine for system performance.
