Hey Glenn,
Looks like Andreas answered some of your questions. I'll answer a few more.
There is only one version of IO500. You can run it with or without
stonewall and both are valid results. There are a few caveats:
1. It only works right now with IOR and pfind and you must set a
stonewall limit of at least 300 seconds
1. It would be nice if it works with mdtest but that hasn't been
added yet
2. For IOR, you must use the --stoneWallingWearOut option so that
stragglers are accounted for
3. The io500.sh doesn't support it yet so you'd have to modify it.
1. What it should do is automatically parse the output of the IOR
write phases and record the actual amount of data written by each process
and then pass those values to the corresponding read phase.
2. One thing you can do is run it once with stonewall to see how much
IO you can do in five minutes and then modify io500.sh accordingly.
3. Obviously it will be better when io500.sh does this for us.
When you say anonymous, what exactly did you have in mind? Shroud
institution, vendor, file system type, or just some of these? It's a tough
balance. Obviously we want submissions but is there value in a totally
anonymous result? I guess we see the degradation from easy to hard but is
it useful information if we don't know what filesystem it was? Here's an
example of something that would be awesome: someone submits a Lustre result
with very little degradation from easy to hard and other people in the
community say, "Wow! How did they do that?" and IO500 submission contains
enough info for this result to be reproducible. An anonymous submission
wouldn't allow this. Is there some other value it provides beyond just
inflating the list? (which might be sufficiently valuable in and of itself
. . .)
John
On Tue, Jun 12, 2018 at 3:47 PM, Glenn Lockwood <glock(a)lbl.gov> wrote:
Hi John & Committee
I'd like to run IO-500 on our systems, but I have a few concerns that
other sites may also share. In the interests of gaining clarity and
resolution before the deadline, I figure I would ask them here rather than
in private.
Concern #1: The current state of the authoritative IO-500 benchmark
distribution is a little unclear to me . As I understand it, there are two
versions:
1. the official version, where each benchmark must run for at least five
minutes
2. the stonewall version, where each benchmark is allowed to stop after
five minutes
In addition, I've been confused by the different options of parallel
find. It looks like the most sensible one, pfind, is in the
"utilities/find/old/" directory whose name suggests it is old and I
shouldn't be using it. Is this true?
Concern #2: I can't help but notice that several HPC storage vendors have
been using the IO-500 results for marketing material ("IME is holistically
faster than DataWarp" and "DataWarp has the fastest peak flash
performance"). It is therefore conceivable that submitting anything but
hero numbers could be used to make me, my employer, or our vendor partners
look bad. I don't want my center's results being used to show how bad our
storage solution is, especially if the numbers are only low because I
didn't tune the benchmarks optimally.
As such, is it possible to submit results, hero or otherwise,
anonymously? Even though there's only a few 1.6 TB/sec file systems in
production in the world, even the pretense of anonymity would make me feel
more secure in submitting sub-optimal (or embarrassing) numbers.
Thanks!
Glenn
On Tue, Jun 12, 2018 at 2:25 PM John Bent <johnbent(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello IO500 friends,
>
> We are at a critical junction for IO500. Hopefully most of you joined
> this list because you agree with the motivation behind IO500 and only a few
> of you joined to laugh at its painful demise.
>
> To the former, the committee wants to remind you all that we will unveil
> the second list at ISC18. As of now, we do have a few submissions but we
> fear they may be too few to be sufficiently impressive to ensure our
> continued relevance. We are clearly still too new to have achieved
> critical mass.
>
> We remain committed to the community's need for an IO500. Reporting only
> hero numbers as was the pre-IO500 status quo hurts us all. Collecting a
> large historical data set of IO performance benefits us all.
>
> Please help ensure the success of our effort by submitting results
> yourselves and by encouraging and soliciting others to do so. The
> community stands ready to provide assistance as is necessary although
> please remember that the benchmark is very easy to run.
>
> Thanks!
>
> John (on behalf of the committee)
>
>
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>
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>
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