Collaborative Research: Automatic Extraction of Parallel I/O Benchmarks from HEC Applications

I/O性能通常是高端计算(HEC)代码的一个问题，因为它们的数据密集度越来越高，而且CPU-I/O性能差距越来越大。可移植的并行I/O基准可以帮助(1)应用程序开发人员提高其代码的性能，(2)HEC存储系统架构师改进他们的设计，以及(3)HEC平台的未来和当前所有者通过更好的系统配置和配置来降低硬件成本并提高应用程序性能。为了跟上HEC应用日益增长的规模和复杂性，该项目开发了并行I/O基准的自动生成，类似于用于计算的SPEC和NAS基准。我们的方法将嵌入到BenchMaker中，这是一个原型工具，它采用真实世界的大规模并行应用程序，并自动将其提取为紧凑、人类可理解的、I/O密集型和参数化的基准测试。这样的基准测试准确地反映了原始应用程序的I/O特征和I/O性能，而且执行时间更短，对库的需求更少，可移植性更好，易于伸缩。这项研究将产生使整个计算科学界受益的基准和工具。这些基准原型将用于并行计算课程项目和学生研究竞赛。

I/O performance is often an issue for high-end computing (HEC) codes, due to their increasingly data-intensive nature and the ever-growing CPU-I/O performance gap. Portable parallel I/O benchmarks can help (1) application developers to improve their codes' performance, (2) HEC storage systems architects to improve their designs, and (3) future and current owners of HEC platforms to reduce hardware cost and improve application performance through better system provisioning and configuration. To keep up with the growing scale and complexity of HEC applications, this project develops automated generation of parallel I/O benchmarks, analogous to the SPEC and NAS benchmarks for computation. Our approach will be embedded in BenchMaker, a prototype tool that takes a real-world, large-scale parallel application and automatically distills it into a compact, human-intelligible, I/O-intensive, and parameterized benchmark. Such a benchmark accurately reflects the original application's I/O characteristics and I/O performance, yet with shorter execution time, reduced need for libraries, better portability, and easy scalability. Benchmarks and tools that benefit the computational science community at large will be produced by this research. These benchmark prototypes will be used for parallel computing course projects and student research contests.