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