Birds of a Feather Archive

IO500: The High-Performance Storage Community

Authors: Dean Hildebrand (Google LLC), Julian Kunkel (University of Göttingen, GWDG, Germany), Andreas Dilger (DataDirect Networks (DDN)), Jay Lofstead (Sandia National Laboratories), George Markomanolis (CSC – IT Center for Science Ltd, Finland)

Abstract: With the increasing importance of efficient IO to reach peak computing performance, the IO500 is becoming the de-facto standard for measuring HPC storage performance. Developed in 2017, the IO500 has released two lists every year since, with the BoF highlight being the new IO500 list presentation.

This BoF’s goal is to foster IO500 community to progress the common goals of creating, sharing, and benefiting from a large corpus of shared storage performance data. We are also building a detailed repository of high-performance production storage systems as they evolve over time, providing a knowledge base for HPC researchers and system designers.

Long Description: Goals of the BoF are to 1) reveal the new IO500 list and provide highlights and insight on the state of HPC storage; 2) advertise the community, discussing and steering the direction of the community effort and latest developments; 3) discuss the benefit and direction of community efforts.

The IO500 benchmark consists of both data and metadata benchmarks to identify performance boundaries for optimized and suboptimal HPC applications under a variety of usage patterns. Evaluating performance across the full range of HPC I/O patterns provides concrete guidance to users on new and emerging HPC storage systems. Together with comprehensive information about the sites, supercomputers, and storage, the community can analyze the in-depth system characteristics tracked by the list. In contrast to other lists, the IO500 collects the configuration and execution scripts for providing means of result verification and sharing best practices for HPC sites. Through our communication channels, we exchange tuning and configuration ideas with community members to maximum storage performance. The IO500 has released one official list at ISC HPC and one at Supercomputing. Moreover, the IO500 benchmark is used by the Student cluster competition and is supported by the Virtual Institute for I/O (VI4IO).

Current IO500 community efforts include: * creation of Production and Research lists * improved reproducibility effort to score and categorize submissions * addition of new benchmarks to cover the ever changing set of HPC I/O characteristics * improving the submission mechanism to make it easier for contributors * easing access and analysis of IO500 datasets

Expected HPC audience are 1) I/O experts and developers from industry, academia, and government laboratories, 2) researchers/engineers working on high-performance I/O, 3) domain scientists and computer scientists interested in discussing I/O issues.

The outcome of this BoF will steer the direction of the community efforts.

URL: https://io500.org/


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