Automatic Identification of Application I/O Signatures from Noisy Server-Side Traces

Conference · Wed Jan 01 00:00:00 EST 2014

OSTI ID:1121177

Liu, Yang ^[1]; Gunasekaran, Raghul ^[1]; Ma, Xiaosong ^[1]; Vazhkudai, Sudharshan S ^[1]

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1. ORNL

Competing workloads on a shared storage system cause I/O resource contention and application performance vagaries. This problem is already evident in today s HPC storage systems and is likely to become acute at exascale. We need more interaction between application I/O requirements and system software tools to help alleviate the I/O bottleneck, moving towards I/O-aware job scheduling. However, this requires rich techniques to capture application I/O characteristics, which remain evasive in production systems. Traditionally, I/O characteristics have been obtained using client-side tracing tools, with drawbacks such as non-trivial instrumentation/development costs, large trace traffic, and inconsistent adoption. We present a novel approach, I/O Signature Identifier (IOSI), to characterize the I/O behavior of data-intensive applications. IOSI extracts signatures from noisy, zero-overhead server-side I/O throughput logs that are already collected on today s supercomputers, without interfering with the compiling/execution of applications. We evaluated IOSI using the Spider storage system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the S3D turbulence application (running on 18,000 Titan nodes), and benchmark-based pseudo-applications. Through our ex- periments we confirmed that IOSI effectively extracts an application s I/O signature despite significant server-side noise. Compared to client-side tracing tools, IOSI is transparent, interface-agnostic, and incurs no overhead. Compared to alternative data alignment techniques (e.g., dynamic time warping), it offers higher signature accuracy and shorter processing time.

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States). Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: DE-AC05-00OR22725
• OSTI ID: 1121177
• Resource Relation: Conference: 12th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST), Santa Clara, CA, USA, 20140217, 20140220
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English