Detailed analysis of I/O traces for large scale applications

- In this paper, we present a tool to extract I/O traces from very large applications running at full scale during their production runs. We analyze these traces to gain information about the application. We analyze the traces of three applications. The analysis showed that the I/O traces reveal much information about the application even without access to the source code. In particular, these I/O traces provide multiple indications towards the algorithmic nature of the application by observing the changes of data amount and I/O request distribution at the checkpoints. Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) is one of the kind of algorithms that can exhibit such I/O behavior. This is the first study of I/O characteristics of unbalanced AMR-supported applications at scale. The key observations that we made in the trace were (1) Variation in aggregate data sizes across checkpoints for AMR and non-AMR applications, (2) Variation in the number of I/O calls by a client depending on the nature of the...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2009
• Where: HIPC
• Authors: Nithin Nakka, Alok N. Choudhary, Wei-keng Liao, Lee Ward, Ruth Klundt, Marlow I. Weston
• Keywords: Adaptive Mesh Refinement, Distributed And Parallel Computing, HIPC 2009, Possible Erroneous Calls, Unbalanced Amr-supported Applications