TUTORIAL
Presenters: Robert Latham, Robert Ross, Brent Welch, Glenn Lockwood
Time: Sunday, November 11th, 8:30am – 5pm
Location: C155
Description: I/O on HPC systems is a black art. This tutorial sheds light on the state-of-the-art in parallel I/O and provides the knowledge necessary for attendees to best leverage I/O resources available to them. We cover the entire I/O software stack including storage and parallel file systems at the lowest layer, the role of burst buffers (NVRAM), intermediate layers (such as MPI-IO), and high-level I/O libraries (such as HDF-5). We emphasize ways to use these interfaces that result in high performance and tools for generating insight into these stacks. Benchmarks on real systems are used throughout to show real-world results.
In the first third of the tutorial we cover the fundamentals of parallel I/O. We discuss storage technologies, both present and near-future. Our parallel file systems material covers general concepts and gives examples from Lustre, GPFS, PanFS, HDFS, Ceph, and Cloud Storage.
Our second third takes a more application-oriented focus. We examine the upper library layers of the I/O stack, covering MPI-IO, Parallel netCDF, and HDF5. We discuss interface features, show code examples, and describe how application calls translate into PFS operations.
Finally, we discuss tools for capturing and understanding I/O behavior.