ACIC: Automatic cloud I/O configurator for HPC applications

The cloud has become a promising alternative to traditional HPC centers or in-house clusters. This new environment highlights the I/O bottleneck problem, typically with top-of-the-line compute instances but sub-par communication and I/O facilities. It has been observed that changing cloud I/O system configurations leads to significant variation in the performance and cost efficiency of I/O intensive HPC applications. However, storage system configuration is tedious and error-prone to do manually, even for experts. This paper proposes ACIC, which takes a given application running on a given cloud platform, and automatically searches for optimized I/O system configurations. ACIC utilizes machine learning models to perform black-box performance/cost predictions. To tackle the high-dimensional parameter exploration space unique to cloud platforms, we enable affordable, reusable, and incremental training guided by Plackett and Burman Matrices. Results with four representative applications indicate that ACIC consistently identifies near-optimal configurations among a large group of candidate settings.