Understanding I/O performance behavior is crucial to optimize I/O-intensive applications but also the infrastructure of data centers. However, with the dawn of new technologies such as NVRAM, burst-buffers, active storage/function shipping, and network attached memory, the complexity of storage infrastructure increases significantly and the boundary between memory and storage blurs. During the procurement of new systems, data centers have to ensure that the application's needs are met. Therefore, they need to define the proper requirements for storage and provide I/O benchmarks that represent application workloads to quantify and verify I/O performance.

The main goal of the workshop is the discussion of tools to identify (in-)efficient usage of I/O resources on modern storage subsystems from the perspective of users and data centers.

The workshop covers:

1. a discussion of design alternatives of storage architectures and their implications on user workflows;
2. telemetry and monitoring information necessary to enable efficient performance optimization of system and applications;
3. the development of representative benchmarks resembling the applications' needs.

The discussion of alternative storage architectures lays the foundation for the requirements of the monitoring and benchmarking efforts. Speakers involved in storage and file system research will present experience in alternative storage architectures, application workflows, monitoring tools to identify bottlenecks in I/O, and (benchmarking) tools to quantify I/O performance. Scientists involved in various application domains can give an introduction to their workflows and I/O requirements.

By bringing together application developers/users and I/O experts, we support the development of tools to identify and quantify I/O inefficiencies that support users and data centers.

This workshop is supported by SPPEXA and DKRZ and powered by ESiWACE ¹⁾ and the Virtual Institute for I/O.

It is embedded into a joint cooperation workshop between DKRZ and JAMSTEC.

The workshop is organized by

• Julian Kunkel (DKRZ), kunkel@dkrz.de
• Tsuyoshi Nakagawa (JAMSTEC), tnakagawa@jamstec.go.jp
• Jay Lofstead (Sandia National Laboratory), jay gflofst@sandia.gov

To participate, please register online (the deadline is now over). Alternatively, you may send an email to kunkel@dkrz.de. The deadline for registration is Feb. 25th. Note that our seats are limited and we have to confirm your attendance (you may also kindly ask about the status).

Within walking distance, we recommend the: Mercure Hotel Hamburg Mitte
Address: Schroederstiftstr. 3, 20146 Hamburg - Rotherbaum, Deutschland

DKRZ has a customer ID that we can provide to you upon request; this should give you a condition of 79€ per night.

The workshop is scheduled for a duration of one day, with discussion time between talks – directly followed by another workshop (to be announced). It is intended to use the workshop to foster the international collaboration for the IO-500 list, i.e., the definition of a meaningful I/O benchmark for tracking storage performance for current and future systems.

The Agenda is currently in preparation.

• 14:00 – Welcome
  Thomas Ludwig (DKRZ), Makoto Tsukakoshi (JAMSTEC), Julian Kunkel (DKRZ) – Slides
• 14:10 – Goals of the workshop
  Julian Kunkel (DKRZ) – Slides

• 14:30 – NVMe and NVMe over Fabrics - Architecture and HPC Usecases
  Idan Burstein (Mellanox) – Slides
• 15:00 – Exascale Storage Architecture in the SAGE Project
  Giuseppe Congiu (Seagate) – Slides
• 15:30 – Advanced Data Placement via Ad-hoc File Systems at Extreme Scale
  Sebastian Oeste (TU Dresden) – Slides
• 16:00 – Coffee break
• 16:30 – In-memory analytics workflows on large scale climate datasets
  Alessandro D'Anca (CMCC Foundation) – Slides
• 17:00 – I/O locality and I/O Workload Characterization
  Jean-Thomas Acquaviva (DDN) – Slides
• 17:30 – Discussion
  Jean-Thomas Acquaviva (DDN)
• 18:00 End

• 19:00 Invited dinner at the Rickmer Rickmers; the Rickmer Rickmers has a nice museum that is covered for our guests.
  • Transport: at best you take the U3 at the stop “Schlump” next to DKRZ to Landungsbrücken (take the right staircase when entering the Schlump station).
  • Location in Google Maps

• 09:00 – NEXTGenIO Performance Tools for In-Memory I/O
  Holger Brunst (ZIH / TU Dresden) – Slides
• 09:30 – Leveraging Continuous Monitoring & Periodic Benchmarking for Understanding Production HPC I/O Behavior
  Shane Snyder (Argonne National Laboratory) – Slides
• 10:00 – Online Monitoring of I/O
  Eugen Betke (DKRZ) – Slides
• 10:30 – Coffee
• 11:00 – LLview: Job-based I/O-monitoring with GPFS mmpmon data
  Wolfgang Frings (FZ Jülich) – Slides
• 11:30 – Understanding and Improving Storage Accesses at the K computer
  Yuichi Tsujita (RIKEN) – Slides
• 12:00 – Discussion
  Wolfgang Frings (FZ Jülich)
• 12:30 – Lunch

• 13:30 – Vendor Perspective on HPC Storage Benchmarking
  Denis Gutfreund (ATOS) – Slides
• 14:00 – Improving data storage system structure and performance over various applications at JAMSTEC
  Tsuyoshi Nakagawa (JAMSTEC) – Slides
• 14:30 – Coffee
• 15:00 – Improving NoSQL Database Benchmarking: Lessons Learned
  Steffen Friedrich (Universität Hamburg) – Slides
• 15:30 – Analyzing I/O Profiles
  Keeran Brabazon (ARM) – Slides
• 16:00 – Coffee
• 16:30 – Benchmarking for NWP/climate
  Hisashi Yashiro (RIKEN) – Slides
• 17:00 – Metadata/Small file benchmarking / Status of IO-500
  Julian Kunkel (DKRZ) – Slides
• 17:30 – Discussion
  Julian Kunkel (DKRZ)
• 17:55 – Farewell
  Thomas Ludwig (DKRZ), Makoto Tsukakoshi (JAMSTEC), Julian Kunkel
• 18:00 – End of the workshop