Table of Contents

HPC-IODC: HPC I/O in the Data Center Workshop

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Managing scientific data at large scale is challenging for scientists but also for the host data center. The storage and file systems deployed within a data center are expected to meet users' requirements for data integrity and high performance across heterogeneous and concurrently running applications.

With new storage technologies and layers in the memory hierarchy, the picture is becoming murkier. To effectively manage the data load within a data center, I/O experts must understand how users expect to use these new storage technologies and what services they should provide in order to enhance user productivity. We seek to ensure a systems-level perspective is included in these discussions.

In this workshop we bring together I/O experts from data centers and application workflows to share current practices for scientific workflows, issues and obstacles for both hardware and the software stack, and R&D to overcome these issues.

The workshop content is build on two tracks with calls for papers/talks:

Contributions to both tracks are peer reviewed and require submission of the respective research paper or idea for your presentation via Easychair (see the descriptions below).

We will have a keynote by Robert Ross with the topic: “Studying I/O in the Data Center: Observing and Simulating I/O for Fun and Profit”.

Rob Ross from Argonne National Laboratory serves as deputy director of the Scientific Data Management, Analysis, and Visualization Institute. He lead and was involved in many storage projects such as PVFS2, Darshan and CODES, and published more than 100 papers in the area of HPC-I/O.

The workshop is held in conjunction with the ISC-HPC. See also our last year's workshop web page.

Please also see our BoF for the community project VI4IO at ISC.

Date Thursday June 23th, 2016
Venue Frankfurt, Germany, Details about the ISC-HPC venue
Mailinglist HPC-IODC-16
Contact Julian Kunkel

Organization

The workshop is organized by

Program committee

Participation

The workshop is integrated into ISC-HPC. We welcome everybody to joint the workshop, including:

You may be interested to join our open mailing list HPC-IODC-16 which is open to discuss HPC-I/O topics.

We especially welcome participants that are willing to give a presentation about the I/O of the representing institutions data center. Note that such presentations should cover the topics mentioned below.

Track: research papers

We accept short papers with up to 10 pages (excl. references) in LNCS format. Please see the instructions and templates for authors provided by Springer.

Our targeted proceedings are ISC's post-conference workshop proceedings in Springers LNCS. We use Easychair for managing the proceedings and PC interaction.

Paper Deadlines

Track: Talks by I/O experts

The topics of interest in this track include but are not limited to:

We use Easychair for managing the acceptance and PC interaction. If you are interested to participate please submit a short (1/2 page) intended abstract of your talk together with a short Bio.

Deadlines for the submission of the abstract

Content

The following list of items should be tried to be integrated into a talk covering your data center, if possible. We hope your sites administrator will support you to gather the information with little effort.

  1. Workload characterization
    1. Scientific Workflow (give a short introduction)
      1. A typical use-case (if multiple are known, feel free to present more)
      2. Involved number of files / amount of data
    2. Job mix
      1. Node utilization (rel. to peak-performance)
  2. System view
    1. Architecture
      1. Schema of the client/server infrastructure
        1. Capacities (Tape, Disk, etc.)
      2. Potential peak-performance of the storage
        1. Theoretical
        2. Optional: performance results of acceptance tests.
      3. Software / Middleware used, e.g. NetCDF 4.X, HDF5, …
    2. Monitoring infrastructure
      1. Tools and systems used to gather and analyse utilization
    3. Actual observed performance in production
      1. Throughput graphs of the storage (e.g. from Ganglia)
      2. Metadata throughput (Ops/s)
    4. Files on the storage
      1. Number of files (if possible per file type)
      2. Distribution of file sizes
  3. Issues / Obstacles
    1. Hardware
    2. Software
    3. Pain points (what is seen as the biggest problem(s) and suggested solutions, if known)
  4. Conducted R&D (that aim to mitigate issues)
    1. Future perspective
    2. Known or projected future workload characterization
    3. Scheduled hardware upgrades and new capabilities we should focus on exploiting as a community
    4. Ideal system characteristics and how it addresses current problems or challenges
    5. what hardware should be added
    6. what software should be developed to make things work better (capabilities perspective)
    7. Items requiring discussion to work through how to address

Agenda

The Agenda is currently in preparation.