I/O performance challenges at leadership scale

Author

Lang, Shinan ; Carns, Philip ; Latham, Rob ; Ross, Robert ; Harms, Kevin ; Allcock, W.

Author_Institution

Math. & Comput. Sci. Div., Argonne Nat. Lab., Argonne, IL, USA

fYear

2009

fDate

14-20 Nov. 2009

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

12

Abstract

Today´s top high performance computing systems run applications with hundreds of thousands of processes, contain hundreds of storage nodes, and must meet massive I/O requirements for capacity and performance. These leadership-class systems face daunting challenges to deploying scalable I/O systems. In this paper we present a case study of the I/O challenges to performance and scalability on Intrepid, the IBM Blue Gene/P system at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. Listed in the top 5 fastest supercomputers of 2008, Intrepid runs computational science applications with intensive demands on the I/O system. We show that Intrepid´s file and storage system sustain high performance under varying workloads as the applications scale with the number of processes.

Keywords

IBM computers; parallel machines; storage management; Argonne Leadership Computing Facility; I/O performance; I/O requirement; I/O system; IBM Blue Gene/P system; Intrepid; computational science application; file system; high performance computing system; leadership scale; leadership-class system; storage node; storage system; supercomputer;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

High Performance Computing Networking, Storage and Analysis, Proceedings of the Conference on

Conference_Location

Portland, OR

Type

conf

DOI

10.1145/1654059.1654100

Filename

6375530