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

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

Abstract: With the increasing importance of efficient I/O to reach peak computing performance, the IO500 is quickly becoming the de-facto standard for measuring HPC storage performance. Developed in 2017, the IO500 has released two lists per year since then. This BoF’s highlight includes presenting the new IO500 list.

This BoF’s goal is to foster the IO500 and VI4IO communities to further the common goals of creating, sharing and benefiting from a large corpus of shared storage performance data. We also provide a detailed repository about high-performance production storage systems over time as a knowledge base for other researchers and system designers.

Long Description: Goals of the BoF are to 1) reveal the new 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 both data and metadata benchmarks to identify performance boundaries for optimized and suboptimal applications. The utilization of different types of benchmarks with various patterns provide a concrete outcome for the evaluated storage. Together with comprehensive data from sites, supercomputers, and storage, an 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 configuration and 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 per year one official list during ISC HPC and one at Supercomputing. Moreover, the IO-500 will be used during the 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: https://io500.org/pages/bof-sc21


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