[IO-500] ISC BOF report

All, We had a great session at ISC (about 30 people I think) and made great progress in the weeks leading up to it as well. Thanks to Satoshi we even got the two attached slides added into the official slides being released from the Top 500 session! We had 6 people sign up at the BOF saying that they’ll run the benchmark when it is finalized. I know I always say that we have ‘almost’ finalized the benchmark. But we really are getting much closer; it helped so much that Nathan combined the benchmarks and George worked on the script. I think we only have two open questions right now: 1. do 47K random IO in the IOR-hard or do 47K simple strided? My original thinking was strided but someone pointed out that the idea is to create the bounding box and random is harder than strided. Also random might be increasingly prevalent these days with more analytics and machine learning and graph analytics, etc. So I propose that we do random unless there are objections here. 2. Should we do some sort of mixed IO workload in addition to running the 4 tests serially? I like the idea but am not sure how exactly to do it. Do we need to merely mix IOR-hard and IOR-easy or md-hard and md-easy or both or mix all 4 at once? Do we just launch multiple command lines in the background and hope that the mpirun launch times are fast enough that they overlap? Do we need to modify IOR/mdtest to split the ranks in half and do different workloads with the two halves? Thoughts? We also made some procedural decisions. The initial steering committee will be Jay Lofstead, Julian Kunkle, and myself. That steering committee membership will last until IO500 is up and running and stable at which point the community can nominate new members. All decisions will be discussed first on the mailing list and we will try for as much consensus as possible. The VI4IO organization will host the IO500. Thanks very much, John