[hpc-announce] IO500 Revised Call For Submissions Mid-2020 List

[committee at io500.org]

New Deadline: 13 July 2020 AoE

NOTE: Given the short timeframe from the original announcement and 
complexities with some of the changes for this list, the deadline has 
been pushed out to give the community more time to participate. The BoF 
announcing the winners will be online 23 July 2020.

Announcement:
The IO500 [1] is now accepting and encouraging submissions for the
upcoming 6th IO500 list. Once again, we are also accepting submissions
to the 10 Node Challenge to encourage the submission of small scale
results. The new ranked lists will be announced via live-stream at a
virtual session. We hope to see many new results.

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
[1] was created in 2017, published its first list at SC17, and has grown
exponentially since then. The need for such an initiative has long been
known within High-Performance Computing; however, defining appropriate
benchmarks had 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:

     * Maximizing simplicity in running the benchmark suite
     * Encouraging optimization and documentation of tuning parameters 
for
performance
     * Allowing submitters to highlight their "hero run" performance
numbers
     * 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 constrained parameters forcing a difficult usage pattern in
an attempt to determine a lower-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:

     * Gather historical data for the sake of analysis and to aid
predictions of storage futures
     * Collect tuning data to share valuable performance optimizations
across the community
     * Encourage vendors and designers to optimize for workloads beyond
"hero runs"
     * Establish bounded expectations for users, procurers, and
administrators

10 NODE I/O CHALLENGE

The 10 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, e.g., any number of
servers. When submitting for the IO500 list, you can opt-in for
"Participate in the 10 compute node challenge only", then we will not
include the results into the ranked list. Other 10-node node submissions
will be included in the full list and in the ranked list. We will
announce the result in a separate derived list and in the full list but
not on the ranked IO500 list at https://io500.org/.

This information and rules for ISC20 submissions are available here:
https://www.vi4io.org/io500/rules/submission

Thanks,

The IO500 Committee

Links:
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[1] http://io500.org/