Call for Submission

Stabilization Period: April 1st - April 15th, 2024
Submission Deadline: May 3rd, 2024 AoE

The IO500 is now accepting and encouraging submissions for the upcoming 14th semi-annual IO500 Production and Research lists, in conjunction with ISC'24. Once again, we are also accepting submissions to the 10 Client Node Challenge to encourage the submission of small scale results. View the requirements for submitting to each list on the IO500 Submissions Webpage. The new ranked lists will be announced at the "IO500: High Performance Storage Community" BoF. We hope to see many new results.

The github repo has a new tag io500-isc24 for the current version of the benchmark for this list.

Background

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 benchmarks represent community accepted standards, including being used in Request for Proposals for new HPC platforms. The benchmarks showcase the IO access pattern extremes giving a full picture of storage system potential performance. 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.

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

  1. Represent naive and optimized access patterns for the execution of a rich variety of HPC applications, their achievable performance and the documentation of how the numbers are achieved.
  2. Support small to extreme-scale Research and Production HPC systems using flexible storage APIs
  3. Maximizing simplicity in running the benchmark suite

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. Supported storage APIs are those that are part of IOR and mdtest. Extending these tools with a public pull request can be done to enable new storage APIs.

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
  5. Understand and be able to reproduce performance on storage systems

Using the IO500 Reproducibility guidelines, each submission is labeled according to the breadth of details provided and the access to the deployed storage software that enables the community to reproduce the results and study system design changes over time.

The IO500 follows a two-staged approach. First, there will be a two-week stabilization period during which we encourage the community to verify that the benchmark runs properly on a variety of storage systems. During this period the benchmark may be updated based upon feedback from the community. The final benchmark will then be released. We expect that runs compliant with the rules made during the stabilization period will be valid as a final submission unless a significant defect is found.

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 ISC24 BoF on Tuesday, May 12, 2024 at 10:05am - 11:05am CEST, where we will announce the new IO500 Production and Research lists and their 10 client node counterparts.

Be Part of the Community

Submissions of all sizes are welcome; the webpage has customizable sorting, so it is possible to submit on a small system and still get a very good per-client score, for example. We will also highlight new and interesting results with invited talk(s) at the BoF.