[hpc-announce] IO500 SC25 list call for submission (deadline extended to Nov 7th)

[Jean Luca Bez]

Call for Submission

Stabilization Period: Sep 29th - Oct 3rd, 2025
Submission Deadline: Nov 7th, 2025 AoE (deadline extended)

The IO500 will soon be accepting and encouraging submissions for the
upcoming 17th semi-annual IO500 Production and Research lists, in
conjunction with SC'25. Once again, we will also be accepting
submissions to the 10 Client Node Challenge to encourage the
submission of small scale results. View the requirements for
submitting to each list on the IO500 Submissions Webpage. The new
ranked lists will be announced at the "IO500: High Performance Storage
Community" BoF. We hope to see many new results.

The tag io500-sc25 should be used for submissions to this version of
the benchmark list.

Background

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 benchmarks represent community accepted
standards, including being used in Request for Proposals for new HPC
platforms. The benchmarks showcase the IO access pattern extremes
giving a full picture of storage system potential performance. 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.

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

     Represent naive and optimized access patterns for the execution
of a rich variety of HPC applications, their achievable performance,
and the documentation of how the numbers are achieved.
     Support small to extreme-scale Research and Production HPC
systems using flexible storage APIs
     Maximizing simplicity in running the benchmark suite

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. New in this release is a random
4KB read phase, to better understand the performance of non-sequential
IO patterns used in AI workloads. 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.
Supported storage APIs are those that are part of IOR and mdtest.
Extending these tools with a public pull request can be done to enable
new storage APIs.

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
     Understand and be able to reproduce performance on storage systems

Using the IO500 Reproducibility guidelines, each submission is labeled
according to the breadth of details provided and the access to the
deployed storage software that enables the community to reproduce the
results and study system design changes over time.

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 SC25 BoF where we will announce the new IO500 Production
and Research lists and their 10 client node counterparts.

Be Part of the Community

Submissions of all sizes are welcome; the webpage has customizable
sorting, so it is possible to submit on a small system and still get a
very good per-client score, for example. We will also highlight new
and interesting results with invited talk(s) at the BoF.