24/7 Characterization of petascale I/O workloads

Abstract--Developing and tuning computational science applications to run on extreme scale systems are increasingly complicated processes. Challenges such as managing memory access and tuning message-passing behavior are made easier by tools designed specifically to aid in these processes. Tools that can help users better understand the behavior of their application with respect to I/O have not yet reached the level of utility necessary to play a central role in application development and tuning. This deficiency in the tool set means that we have a poor understanding of how specific applications interact with storage. Worse, the community has little knowledge of what sorts of access patterns are common in today's applications, leading to confusion in the storage research community as to the pressing needs of the computational science community. This paper describes the Darshan I/O characterization tool. Darshan is designed to capture an accurate picture of application I/O behavio...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CLUSTER
• Authors: Philip H. Carns, Robert Latham, Robert B. Ross, Kamil Iskra, Samuel Lang, Katherine Riley
• Keywords: CLUSTER 2009, Computational Science Applications, Darshan I/O Characterization, Distributed And Parallel Computing, I/O Behavior