Dear IO500 Community,
We are very excited to inform you of some recent exterior changes in
IO500 that should be mostly transparent to the community. We believe
these changes will allow us to best continue serving you and continuing
to strive towards our collective goals of improved understanding and
optimization of storage performance. All of these exterior changes are
due to an important internal change which was the formal creation of a
non-profit organization, the IO500 Foundation, created for the purpose
of ensuring the continuity of IO500.
Firstly, our web pages and mailing lists(^) will now be fully hosted at
https://io500.org/ [1] and their associated webcode will be fully
available for community contributions at their open github.com
repository at https://github.com/IO500/webpage [2].
Secondly, our slack channels will now be hosted by the IO500
organization in a dedicated workspace (https://io500workspace.slack.com/
[3]). Please use this link [4](+) to join our new slack channels.
Finally, our github repositories for the aforementioned webpages as well
as the benchmark itself will be hosted by the IO500 organization at
https://github.com/io500/ [5].
The old web hosting, the old repositories, and the old slack channels(*)
will remain temporarily available as we transition to our new homes.
Please update any existing links and workflows accordingly as we will
eventually archive and potentially remove these old locations.
Finally, the IO500 Foundation would like to thank the Virtual Institute
for I/O [6] (VI4IO) for the many years in which it has provided these
services. Further, we encourage our IO500 community to continue
availing itself of the other excellent resources at VI4IO such as the
Comprehensive Data Center List [7] which we hope will continue serving a
complementary purpose to IO500.
Happy Benchmarking!
The IO500 Committee
* The VI4IO workspace will remain available for VI4IO related channels
but the IO500 related channels will have a new home in the new
workspace.
+
https://join.slack.com/t/io500workspace/shared_invite/zt-hv1i5svr-Yj8HR_wRz…
[4]
^ http://lists.io500.org/listinfo.cgi/io500-io500.org [8]
Links:
------
[1] https://io500.org/
[2] https://github.com/IO500/webpage
[3] https://io500workspace.slack.com/
[4]
https://join.slack.com/t/io500workspace/shared_invite/zt-hv1i5svr-Yj8HR_wRz…
[5] https://github.com/io500/
[6] https://www.vi4io.org/
[7] https://www.vi4io.org/hpsl/start
[8] http://lists.io500.org/listinfo.cgi/io500-io500.org
CALL FOR IO500 SUBMISSION
Deadline: 30 October 2020 AoE
Stabilization period: 1st October -- 9th October 2020 AoE
The IO500 [1] is now accepting and encouraging submissions for the
upcoming 7th IO500 list, to be revealed at the IO500 Virtual BOF during
SC20. Once again, we are also accepting submissions to the 10 Node I/O
Challenge to encourage submission of small scale results. The new ranked
lists will be announced at our Virtual SC20 BoF. We hope to see you, and
your results, there.
A new change for the upcoming submission procedure is the introduction
of a stabilization period that aims to harden the benchmark. The final
benchmark is released at the end of this period. During the
stabilization we encourage the community to test the proper execution of
the benchmark and provide us with feedback. We will apply bug fixes to
the code base and expect that results obtained will be valid as full
submission. We also continue with another list for the Student Cluster
Competition, since IO500 is used during this competition.
Also new this year is that we have partnered with Anthony Kougkas' team
at Illinois Institute of Technology to evaluate the submission metadata
describing the storage system on which the test was run to improve the
quality and usefulness of the data IO500 collects. You may be contacted
by one of his students to clarify one or more of the metadata items from
your submission(s). We would appreciate, but do not require, your
cooperation to help improve the submission metadata quality. Results
from their work will be fed back to improve our submission process for
future lists.
The IO500 benchmark suite is designed to be easy to run, and the
community has multiple active support channels to help with any
questions. Please submit results from your system, and we look forward
to seeing many of you at SC20! Please note that submissions of all sizes
are welcome, including multiple submissions from different storage
systems/tiers at a single site. The website 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
[1] was created in 2017, published its first list at SC17, and has grown
continuously since then. The need for such an initiative has long been
known within High-Performance Computing; however, defining appropriate
benchmarks had 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:
* Maximizing simplicity in running the benchmark suite
* Encouraging complexity in tuning for performance
* Allowing submitters to highlight their "hero run" performance
numbers
* 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-bound on the performance. Finally, it includes a namespace search,
as this has been determined to be a highly sought-after feature in HPC
storage systems that have historically not been well-measured.
Submitters are encouraged to share their tuning insights for
publication.
The goals of the community are also multi-fold:
* Gather historical data for the sake of analysis and to aid
predictions of storage futures
* Collect tuning information to share valuable performance
optimizations across the community
* Encourage vendors and designers to optimize for workloads beyond
"hero runs"
* Establish bounded expectations for users, procurers, and
administrators
10 NODE I/O CHALLENGE
The 10 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, e.g., any number of
servers. When submitting for the IO500 list, you can opt-in for
"Participate in the 10 compute node challenge only", then we will not
include the results into the ranked list. Other 10-node node submissions
will be included in the full list and in the ranked list. We will
announce the result in a separate derived list and in the full list but
not on the ranked IO500 list at https://io500.org/ [2]
BIRDS-OF-A-FEATHER
Once again, we encourage you to submit [1], to join our community, and
to attend our virtual BoF "The IO500 and the Virtual Institute of I/O"
at SC20, where we will announce the new IO500 list, the 10 node
challenge list, and the Student Cluster Competition list. We look
forward to answering any questions or concerns you might have.
* [1] http://www.vi4io.org/io500/submission [3]
Thanks,
The IO500 Committee <committee(a)io500.org>
Links:
------
[1] http://io500.org/
[2] https://io500.org/
[3] http://www.vi4io.org/io500/submission
