September 29, 2023 — The IO500 is now accepting and encouraging submissions for the upcoming 13th semi-annual IO500 lists, in conjunction with SC23. Once again, we are also accepting submissions to the 10 Client Node Challenge to encourage the submission of small scale results. The new ranked lists will be announced at the “IO500: High Performance Storage Community” BoF. We hope to see many new results.

The github repo has a new tag io500-sc23 for the current version of the benchmark for this list.

Stabilization Period: Wednesday, Sept 27th – Friday, Oct 6th, 2023
Submission Deadline: Tuesday, Nov 7th, 2023 AoE

What’s New

1. Production and Research Lists – Starting with ISC’23, we implemented a separation of the IO500 list into Production and Research lists. This better reflects the important distinction between storage systems that run in production environments and those that may use more experimental hardware and software configurations. At SC’23, we continue to populate these two lists and users can submit results to either of the two lists (and their 10 client-node counterparts). Please see the requirements for each list and the IO500 submission rules page.
2. IO500 Submission Tool – The IO500 submission tool continues to improve the IO500 knowledge base by ensuring consistency of system metadata in each submission. As part of the submission forms, we have improved the fields that describe the hardware and software of the system under test. For reproducibility and analysis reasons, the easily obtainable fields are mandatory – data from storage servers are for users potentially difficult to obtain, therefore, some remain optional. We continue to improve the web interface to simplify and improve the submission process, but as with any new system, there may be quirks. Please reach out on Slack, the mailing list, or GitHub if you encounter submission issues. Further details will be released on the submission page.
3. New Phases – We are continuing to evaluate the inclusion of optional test phases for additional key workloads – split easy/hard find phases, 4KB and 1MB random read/write phases, and concurrent metadata operations. This is called an extended run. At the moment, we collect the information to verify that additional phases do not significantly impact the results of a standard run and an extended run to facilitate comparisons between the existing and new benchmark phases. In a future release, we may include some or all of these results as part of the standard benchmark. The extended results are not currently included in the scoring of any ranked list.

Background

The benchmark suite is designed to be easy to run and the community has multiple active support channels to help with any questions. Please note that submissions of all sizes are welcome; the site has customizable sorting, so it is possible to submit on a small system and still get a very good per-client score, for example. Additionally, the list is about much more than just the raw rank; all submissions help the community by collecting and publishing a wider corpus of data. More details below.

Following the success of the Top500 in collecting and analyzing historical trends in supercomputer technology and evolution, the IO500 was created in 2017, published its first list at SC17, and has grown continually since then. The need for such an initiative has long been known within the High-Performance Computing community; however, defining appropriate benchmarks has long been challenging. Despite this challenge, the community, after long and spirited discussion, finally reached consensus on a suite of benchmarks and a metric for resolving the scores into a single ranking.

The multi-fold goals of the benchmark suite are as follows:

1. Maximizing simplicity in running the benchmark suite
2. Encouraging optimization and documentation of tuning parameters for performance
3. Allowing submitters to highlight their “hero run” performance numbers
4. Forcing submitters to simultaneously report performance for challenging IO patterns.

Specifically, the benchmark suite includes a hero-run of both IOR and mdtest configured however possible to maximize performance and establish an upper-bound for performance. It also includes an IOR and mdtest run with highly prescribed parameters in an attempt to determine a lower performance bound. Finally, it includes a namespace search as this has been determined to be a highly sought-after feature in HPC storage systems that has historically not been well-measured. Submitters are encouraged to share their tuning insights for publication.

The goals of the community are also multi-fold:

1. Gather historical data for the sake of analysis and to aid predictions of storage futures
2. Collect tuning information to share valuable performance optimizations across the community
3. Encourage vendors and designers to optimize for workloads beyond “hero runs”
4. Establish bounded expectations for users, procurers, and administrators

The IO500 follows a two-staged approach. First, there will be a two-week stabilization period during which we encourage the community to verify that the benchmark runs properly on a variety of storage systems. During this period the benchmark may be updated based upon feedback from the community. The final benchmark will then be released. We expect that runs compliant with the rules made during the stabilization period will be valid as a final submission unless a significant defect is found.

10 Client Node I/O Challenge

The 10 Client Node Challenge is conducted using the regular IO500 benchmark, however, with the rule that exactly 10 client nodes must be used to run the benchmark. You may use any shared storage with any number of servers. We will announce the results in the Production and Research lists as well as in separate derived lists.

Birds-of-a-Feather

Once again, we encourage you to submit to join our community, and to attend the ISC23 BoF on Wednesday, Nov 15, 2023 at 12:15pm – 1:15pm MST, where we will announce the new IO500 Production and Research lists and their 10 client node counterparts. The current list includes results from over 20 different storage system types and 70 institutions. We hope that the upcoming list grows even more.

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Source: IO500