Deadline: 10 November 2019 AoE
The IO500 is now accepting and encouraging submissions for the upcoming 5th IO500 list revealed at SC19 in Denver, Colorado. 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 SC19 BoF [2]. We hope to see you, and your results, there. We have updated our submission rules [3]. This year, we will have a new list for the Student Cluster Competition as IO500 is used for extra points during this competition
The benchmark suite is designed to be easy to run and the community has multiple active support channels to help with any questions. Please submit and we look forward to seeing many of you at SC19! 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 exponentially 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. 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
At SC, we will continue the 10 Node Challenge. This challenge is conducted using the regular IO500 benchmark, however, with the rule that exactly 10 computes nodes must be used to run the benchmark (one exception is the find, which may use 1 node). You may use any shared storage with, e.g., any number of servers. We will announce the result in a separate derived list and in the full list but not on the ranked IO500 list at io500.org.
Once again, we encourage you to submit [1], to join our community, and to attend our BoF “The IO500 and the Virtual Institute of I/O” at SC19, November 19th, 12:15-1:15pm, room 205-207, 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.
The IO500 committee