[hpc-announce] Call For Submissions IO500 ISC21 List

[IO500 Committee]

https://io500.org/cfs
Stabilization Period: 05 - 14 May 2021 AoE
Submission Deadline: 11 June 2021 AoE

The IO500 is now accepting and encouraging submissions for the upcoming 
8th 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.

What's New
Starting with ISC'21, the IO500 now 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. 
During this period the benchmark will be updated based upon feedback 
from the community. The final benchmark will then be released on Monday, 
May 1st. We expect that runs compliant with the rules made during the 
stabilization period are valid as the final submission unless a 
significant defect is found.
We are now creating a more detailed schema to describe the hardware and 
software of the system under test and provide the first set of tools to 
ease capturing of this information for inclusion with the submission. 
Further details will be released on the submission page.

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 
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 prescribed parameters 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 information 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 io500.org.

Birds-of-a-Feather
Once again, we encourage you to submit to join our community, and to 
attend our virtual BoF "The IO500 and the Virtual Institute of I/O" at 
ISC 2021, (time to be announced), where we will announce the new IO500 
and 10 node challenge lists. The current list includes results from 
BeeGFS, CephFS, DAOS, DataWarp, GekkoFS, GFarm, IME, Lustre, MadFS, 
Qumulo, Spectrum Scale, Vast, WekaIO, and YRCloudFile. We hope that the 
upcoming list grows even more.


-- 
The IO500 Committee