IO Pattern Characterization of HPC Applications

摘要

The HPC world is waking up to the importance of storage as an integral part of an HPC solution. Many HPC sites are realizing that HPC class storage coupled with classic enterprise features such as snapshots, replication, disaster recovery, and ILM (Integrated Life Cycle Management), can result in the maximum performance and uptime for HPC applications. However, the biggest problem that HPC centers face is that they don't understand how their applications perform IO (i.e. IO pattern). This means that they can't define meaningful requirements for HPC storage. Knowledge of the IO patterns allows better definition of requirements including both time and money. This paper presents a technique for obtaining IO information and analyzing it to present IO pattern information. The technique is independent of the application.