[hpc-announce] CFS IO500 ISC'26 Deadline 12 June 2026

[IO500 Committee]

https://urldefense.us/v3/__https://io500.org/submission__;!!G_uCfscf7eWS!dNUfClA65iQnvjD54nGsdjLKCqqYqDAqcgK4OyvW3Ub0IaVMefF7g7sMzrxdi5JLvVneJ3pYxKm4-3y_ZVzrsQIIQsY$ 

Deadline 12 June 2026 AoE

The IO500 is now accepting and encouraging submissions for the upcoming 
semi-annual IO500 Production and Research lists, in conjunction with ISC 
HPC 26. Once again, we are also 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 GitHub repository has a new tag io500-isc26 for the current version 
of the benchmark for this 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-stage 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 ISC26 BoF on ISC26, 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 features customizable 
sorting, allowing you to submit on a small system and still achieve a 
very good per-client score, for example. We will also highlight new and 
interesting results at the BoF.