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In stripe-contiguous IO pattern, each OST will be accessed by a group of IO clients. CO means *C*lient/*O*ST ratio, or the max. number of IO clients for each OST. CO=1 by default.
We won't do collective I/O if this hint is set and the IO request size is bigger than this value. That's because when the request size is big, the collective communication overhead increases and the benefits from collective I/O becomes limited. A value of 0 means always perform collective I/O
ROMIO can optimize collective I/O with a version of data sieving. If the I/O request is smaller than this hint's value, though, ROMIO will not try to apply the data sieving optimization.
Collective IO will apply read-modify-write to deal with non-contiguous data by default. However, it will introduce some overhead(IO operation and locking). The Lustre developers have run tests where data sieving showed bad collective write performance for some kinds of workloads. So, to avoid this, we define the romio_lustre_ds_in_coll hint to disable the read-modify-write step in collective I/O. This optimization is distinct from the one in independent I/O (controlled by romio_ds_read and romio_ds_write).
Rob Latham 2016-08-01