Investigating the root causes of I/O interference in HPC storage systems

Speaker: Orçun Yildiz (Inria)
Date: Friday, 4 December 2015, 10:30-12:00
Session: Big Data @ I/O III
Talk type: Project talk (30 min)

Abstract: As we move towards Exascale era, performance variability in the HPC systems still remains as a challenge. I/O interference is one of the major causes of this performance variability. Many works try to mitigate I/O interference by starting with an assumption of a root cause for the interference and trying to optimize or eliminate this root cause. The root causes of I/O interference can be very diverse however. In this work, we conduct an extensive experimental campaign to explore these diverse root causes of I/O interference in HPC storage systems. We use micro-benchmarks on the Grid’5000 testbed to evaluate how the applications’ access pattern, the network components, the file system’s configuration and the backend storage devices influence I/O interference. In this talk, we present the results of our investigation together with the lessons learned from these experiments which we hope that will enable a better understanding of the I/O interference phenomenon across all components of the I/O stack.