ISC'18

The IO500 and the Virtual Institute of I/O

Date 11:00-12:00, June 27th, 2018
Venue ISC HPC, Frankfurt, Germany

Link to the official announcement.

Abstract

Evolving and new storage technologies introduced over the last few years are causing increasing complexity for HPC data management. Hence, analyzing, comparing, or even predicting the performance of different HPC machines and storage systems has become more complicated. To address this challenge, the community has developed a new composite benchmark that has lead to the creation of the competitive IO500 list. The IO500 benchmark consists of several data and metadata benchmarks to identify performance boundaries for optimized and suboptimal applications. In addition to offering different ways to compare storage systems, the list collects detailed information about storage system design to help system designers make informed trade-offs when specifying new storage requirements. While the initial list contains only 9 systems, we expect a rapid growth in the second list.

The development of the benchmark has been powered by the Virtual Institute for I/O (VI4IO), which provides a platform for I/O researchers and enthusiasts for exchanging information, fosters international collaboration in the field of HPC-I/O, and tracks the deployment of large storage systems. VI4IO provides a comprehensive data from sites, supercomputers and storage. This enables an in-depth analysis of various system characteristics.

Agenda

We have a series of interactive talks and discussions.

  • IntroductionJay Lofstead (Slides)
  • The IO500John Bent (Slides)
  • Procuring small HPC storage using IO500 benchmarkGeorge Markomanolis (Slides)
  • The Virtual Institute for I/OJulian Kunkel (Slides)
  • The new IO500 list and analysisJohn Bent (Slides)
  • Features of the new IO500 listJulian Kunkel (Please visit: https://www.vi4io.org/io500/radar for a live demo)
  • Moderated discussionJay, Julian, John