Analyzing the Parallel I/O Severity of MPI Applications
Sandra Méndez, Dolores Isabel Rexachs, Emilio Luque · 2017
Performance evaluation of parallel applications plays an important role in High Performance Computing (HPC). This is also applied to parallel I/O performance evaluation, which requires understanding the I/O pattern of the application and having knowledge about the performance capacity of the HPC I/O system. In this paper, we present a methodology to evaluate the I/O performance of parallel applications based on the I/O severity degree. We define the I/O severity concept taking into account the I/O requirements of a parallel application, the mapping of I/O processes and the configuration of the I/O subsystem. Requirements are expressed in units denominated I/O phases, which are defined using the temporal and spatial pattern of different files of the application. Our approach is applied to the I/O kernels of scientific applications such as S3DIO, FLASH-IO and BT-IO on the SuperMUC supercomputer. Experimental results show that our methodology allows us to identify if a parallel application is limited by the I/O subsystem and identifying possible root causes of the I/O problems.