Damaris: How to Efficiently Leverage Multicore Parallelism to Achieve Scalable, Jitter-free I/O

With exascale computing on the horizon, the performance variability of I/O systems represents a key challenge in sustaining high performance. In many HPC applications, I/O is concurrently performed by all processes, which leads to I/O bursts. This causes resource contention and substantial variability of I/O performance, which significantly impacts the overall application performance and, most importantly, its predictability over time. In this paper, we propose a new approach to I/O, called Damaris, which leverages dedicated I/O cores on each multicore SMP node, along with the use of shared-memory, to efficiently perform asynchronous data processing and I/O in order to hide this variability. We evaluate our approach on three different platforms including the Kraken Cray XT5 supercomputer (ranked 11th in Top500), with the CM1 atmospheric model, one of the target HPC applications for the Blue Waters postpetascale supercomputer project. By overlapping I/O with computation and by gathering data into large files while avoiding synchronization between cores, our solution brings several benefits: 1) it fully hides jitter as well as all I/O-related costs, which makes simulation performance predictable, 2) it increases the sustained write throughput by a factor of 15 compared to standard approaches, 3) it allows almost perfect scalability of the simulation up to over 9,000 cores, as opposed to state-of-the-art approaches which fail to scale, 4) it enables a 600% compression ratio without any additional overhead, leading to a major reduction of storage requirements.