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

对于高端计算（HEC）代码来说，I/O性能通常是一个问题，因为它们的数据密集型性质越来越大，CPU-I/O性能差距也越来越大。便携式并行I/O基准测试可以帮助(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)未来和当前HEC平台的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应用程序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SPEC和NAS计算基准。我们的方法将嵌入到BenchMaker中，这是一个原型工具，它采用现实世界的大规模并行应用程序，并自动将其提炼成紧凑的、人类可理解的、I/ o密集型和参数化的基准。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，同时具有更短的执行时间、更少的库需求、更好的可移植性和更容易的可伸缩性。这项研究将产生有益于整个计算科学界的基准和工具。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.