Using FTracer to characterize an I/O-intensive application

I/O characteristics are vital to application development and orchestration of storage system. Users and system managers usually perform I/O optimizations to applications and file systems according to I/O characteristics of parallel applications. In this paper, we first investigate the overhead of FTracer, which is a I/O characterizing tool proposed in our previous work. Then we tune the parameters of FTracer to reduce the overhead incurred by FTracer. And, we use FTracer to analyze the I/O characteristics of an I/O intensive application called Trace Gather. The results of analysis include two levels of information, file level and node level. They are all useful for further I/O optimization of Trace Gather.