Methodology for Performance Evaluation of the Input/Output System on Computer Clusters

Abstract

The increase of processing units, speed and computational power, and the complexity of scientific applications that use high performance computing require more efficient Input/Output (I/O) systems. In order to efficiently use the I/O it is necessary to know its performance capacity to determine if it fulfills applications I/O requirements. This paper proposes a methodology to evaluate I/O performance on computer clusters under different I/O configurations. This evaluation is useful to study how different I/O subsystem configurations will affect the application performance. This approach encompasses the characterization of the I/O system at three different levels: application, I/O system and I/O devices. We select different system configuration and/or I/O operation parameters and we evaluate the impact on performance by considering both the application and the I/O architecture. During I/O configuration analysis we identify configurable factors that have an impact on the performance of the I/O system. In addition, we extract information in order to select the most suitable configuration for the application.