Call for Submission

Stabilization Period: Monday, April 3rd - Friday, April 14th, 2023
Submission Deadline: Tuesday, May 16st, 2023 AoE

The IO500 is now accepting and encouraging submissions for the upcoming 12th semi-annual IO500 list, in conjunction with ISC23. Once again, we are also accepting submissions to the 10 Client Node Challenge to encourage the submission of small scale results. The new ranked lists will be announced at the ISC23 BoF. We hope to see many new results.

What's New

  1. Creation of Production and Research Lists - Starting with ISC'22, we proposed a separation of the list into separate Production and Research lists. This better reflects the important distinction between storage systems that run in production environments and those that may use more experimental hardware and software configurations. At ISC23, we will formally create these two lists and users will be able to submit to either of the two lists (and their 10 client-node counterparts). Please see the requirements for each list on the IO500 rules page.
  2. New Submission Tool - There is now a new IO500 submission tool that improves the overall submission experience. Users can create accounts and then update and manage all of their submissions through that account. As part of this new tool, we have improved the submission fields that describe the hardware and software of the system under test. For reproducibility and analysis reasons, we now made the easily obtainable fields mandatory - data from storage servers are for users often difficult to obtain, therefore, most remain optional. As a new system, there may be quirks, please reach out on Slack or the mailing list if you see any issues. Further details will be released on the submission page.
  3. Reproducibility - Every submission will now receive a reproducibility score based upon the provided system details and the reproducibility questionnaire. This score will inform the community on the amount of details provided in the submission and the obtainability of the storage system. Further, this score will be used to evaluate if a submission is eligible for the Production list.
  4. New Phases - We are continuing to evaluate the inclusion of optional test phases for additional key workloads - split easy/hard find phases, 4KB and 1MB random read/write phases, and concurrent metadata operations. This is called an extended run. At the moment, we collect the information to verify that additional phases do not significantly impact the results of a standard run and an extended run to facilitate comparisons between the existing and new benchmark phases. In a future release, we may include some or all of these results as part of the standard benchmark. The extended results are not currently included in the scoring of any ranked list.

Background

The benchmark suite is designed to be easy to run and the community has multiple active support channels to help with any questions. Please note that submissions of all sizes are welcome; the site has customizable sorting, so it is possible to submit on a small system and still get a very good per-client score, for example. Additionally, the list is about much more than just the raw rank; all submissions help the community by collecting and publishing a wider corpus of data. More details below.

Following the success of the Top500 in collecting and analyzing historical trends in supercomputer technology and evolution, the IO500 was created in 2017, published its first list at SC17, and has grown continually since then. The need for such an initiative has long been known within High-Performance Computing; however, defining appropriate benchmarks has long been challenging. Despite this challenge, the community, after long and spirited discussion, finally reached consensus on a suite of benchmarks and a metric for resolving the scores into a single ranking.

The multi-fold goals of the benchmark suite are as follows:

  1. Maximizing simplicity in running the benchmark suite
  2. Encouraging optimization and documentation of tuning parameters for performance
  3. Allowing submitters to highlight their "hero run" performance numbers
  4. Forcing submitters to simultaneously report performance for challenging IO patterns.

Specifically, the benchmark suite includes a hero-run of both IOR and mdtest configured however possible to maximize performance and establish an upper-bound for performance. It also includes an IOR and mdtest run with highly prescribed parameters in an attempt to determine a lower performance bound. Finally, it includes a namespace search as this has been determined to be a highly sought-after feature in HPC storage systems that has historically not been well-measured. Submitters are encouraged to share their tuning insights for publication.

The goals of the community are also multi-fold:

  1. Gather historical data for the sake of analysis and to aid predictions of storage futures
  2. Collect tuning information to share valuable performance optimizations across the community
  3. Encourage vendors and designers to optimize for workloads beyond "hero runs"
  4. Establish bounded expectations for users, procurers, and administrators

10 Client Node I/O Challenge

The 10 Client Node Challenge is conducted using the regular IO500 benchmark, however, with the rule that exactly 10 client nodes must be used to run the benchmark. You may use any shared storage with any number of servers. We will announce the results in the Production and Research lists as well as in separate derived lists.

Birds-of-a-Feather

Once again, we encourage you to submit to join our community, and to attend the ISC23 BoF, where we will announce the new IO500 Production and Research lists and their 10 client node counterparts. The current list includes results from twenty different storage system types and 70 institutions. We hope that the upcoming list grows even more.