Table of Contents
SIOX
Scalable I/O For Extreme Performance
The HPC I/O Challenge
During the last decades, increases in processor performance have exceeded those in I/O capacity by a full order of magnitude.
Efforts to bridge this growing gap gave rise to ever more complex I/O architectures, comprising many layers of heterogeneous hard- and software that make performance analysis and localisation of bottlenecks a daunting task at best.
The SIOX Approach
The BMBF-funded project Scalable I/O for Extreme Performance (SIOX) aims to create a system that will aid in and finally automate I/O analysis and optimisation.
To this end, access and performance data will be
- recorded
- on all levels
- in a level-independent format,
- causally correlated,
- structured and archived.
SIOX will use the data collected to
- predict possible performance,
- evaluate actual performance,
- locate and analyse bottlenecks and
- suggest optimized parameters.
The system built is to be deployed on a multitude of parallel file systems running under various operating systems, spanning all major hardware architectures.
Project results will be tested and used with a range of real world climate modelling applications from the DKRZ project portfolio.
Interfaces
All interaction with SIOX is built on the low-level interface siox-ll
. Later, the SIOX project will provide more comfortable and well-adapted high-level interfaces for each of the types of logical nodes, such as siox-cache, siox-network or siox-blockstorage. Furthermore, wrappers may be used to easily adapt software already instrumented for other tools to SIOX. Both high-level APIs and wrappers will build upon siox-ll
to perform their tasks.
Download
SIOX is an OpenSource project. You can download the source code from the GitHub-Repository or clone the repository using the following command:
git clone https://github.com/JulianKunkel/siox.git