The IO-500 and the Virtual Institute of I/O

Authors: Jay Lofstead (Sandia National Laboratories), George Markomanolis (CSC – IT Center for Science, Finland), John Bent (Seagate Systems), Julian Kunkel (University of Reading), Andreas Dilger (Whamcloud Inc)

Abstract: The IO500 is quickly becoming the de facto benchmarking standard for HPC storage. Developed four years ago, the IO500 has released six official lists so far. A BoF highlight is the presentation of the seventh IO-500 list.

The general purpose of this BoF is to foster the IO500 and VI4IO communities to ensure forward progress towards the common goals of creating, sharing, and benefiting from a large corpus of shared storage data. We also serve as a repository of detailed information about production storage system architectures over time as a knowledge base for other researchers and system designers to use.

Long Description: Goals of the BoF are to 1) reveal the seventh IO-500 list and provide highlights and insight; 2) advertise the community hub but also discuss and steer the direction of the community effort and latest developments; 3) to discuss the benefit and direction of the efforts within the community.

The IO-500 benchmark consists of data and metadata benchmarks to identify performance boundaries for optimized and suboptimal applications. The utilization of different benchmarks with various patterns provide a concrete outcome for the evaluated storage. Together with comprehensive data from sites, supercomputers, and storage, in-depth analysis of system characteristics are tracked by the list and can be analyzed. In contrast to other lists, the IO-500 collects the execution scripts for providing means of result verification and sharing best practices for data centers. Through our communication channels, we exchange ideas of tuning and the members of the community achieve maximum performance of their storage. The IO500 has released six official lists so far ( SC17, ISC18, SC18, ISC19, SC19, ISC20) and is constituted by over 100 submissions in the full list. Moreover, the IO-500 will be used during the SC20 Student competition cluster and this illustrates the increased need for more efficient storage.

Goals of the Virtual Institute for I/O are: * Provide a platform for I/O researchers and enthusiasts for exchanging information * Foster international collaboration in the field of high-performance I/O * Track, and encourage, the deployment of large storage systems by hosting information about high-performance storage systems

Expected HPC audience are 1) I/O experts from data centers and industry, 2) researchers/engineers working on high-performance I/O for data centers, 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: http://io500.org/


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