Parallel I/O Characterisation Based on Server-Side Performance Counters

Provisioning of high I/O capabilities for high-end HPC architectures is generally considered a challenge. A good understanding of the characteristics of the utilisation of modern I/O systems can help address the increasing performance gap between I/O and computation. In this paper we present results from an analysis of server-side performance counters that had been collected for multiple years on a parallel file system attached to a peta-scale Blue Gene/P system. We developed a set of general performance characterisation metrics, which we applied to this large dataset.