[Storage-research-list] IO500 SC22 Call for Submissions

[IO500 Committee]

Stabilization Period: Monday, October 3rd - Friday, October 14th
Submission Deadline: Tuesday, November 1st, 2022 AoE

The IO500 is now accepting and encouraging submissions for the upcoming 
10th semi-annual IO500 list, in conjunction with SC22. Once again, we 
are also accepting submissions to the 10 Node Challenge to encourage the 
submission of small scale results. The new ranked lists will be 
announced during  BoF [1]. We hope to see many new results.

The github repo has a new tag: io500-sc22 for the version of the 
benchmark for this list.

What's New
With ISC'22, we proposed a separation of the list into separate 
Production and Research lists, to better reflect the important 
distinction between storage systems that run in production environments 
and those that may use more experimental hardware and software 
configurations. We will experimentally explore what this split will look 
like with the in person BoF attendees and live streamed audience using 
the SC22 results. Given the results of that discussion we will decide 
how to proceed with a potential split.
We are now creating a more detailed schema to describe the hardware and 
software of the system under test and provide the first set of tools to 
ease capturing of this information for inclusion with the submission. 
For reproducibility and analysis reasons, we now made the easily 
obtainable fields mandatory - data from storage servers are for users 
often difficult to obtain, therefore, most remain optional. Further 
details will be released on the submission page [2].

We are evaluating the inclusion of optional test phases for additional 
key workloads - split easy/hard find phases, 4KB and 1MB random 
read/write phases, and concurrent metadata operations. This is called an 
extended run. At the moment, we collect the information to verify that 
additional phases do not significantly impact the results of a standard 
run and an extended run to facilitate comparisons between the existing 
and new benchmark phases. In a future release, we may include some or 
all of these results as part of the standard benchmark. The extended 
results are not currently included in the scoring of any ranked list.
Background

The benchmark suite is designed to be easy to run and the community has 
multiple active support channels to help with any questions. Please note 
that submissions of all sizes are welcome; the site has customizable 
sorting, so it is possible to submit on a small system and still get a 
very good per-client score, for example. Additionally, the list is about 
much more than just the raw rank; all submissions help the community by 
collecting and publishing a wider corpus of data. More details below.
Following the success of the Top500 in collecting and analyzing 
historical trends in supercomputer technology and evolution, the IO500 
was created in 2017, published its first list at SC17, and has grown 
continually since then. The need for such an initiative has long been 
known within High-Performance Computing; however, defining appropriate 
benchmarks has long been challenging. Despite this challenge, the 
community, after long and spirited discussion, finally reached consensus 
on a suite of benchmarks and a metric for resolving the scores into a 
single ranking.

The multi-fold goals of the benchmark suite are as follows:
Maximizing simplicity in running the benchmark suite
Encouraging optimization and documentation of tuning parameters for 
performance
Allowing submitters to highlight their "hero run" performance numbers
Forcing submitters to simultaneously report performance for challenging 
IO patterns.

Specifically, the benchmark suite includes a hero-run of both IOR and 
mdtest configured however possible to maximize performance and establish 
an upper-bound for performance. It also includes an IOR and mdtest run 
with highly prescribed parameters in an attempt to determine a lower 
performance bound. Finally, it includes a namespace search as this has 
been determined to be a highly sought-after feature in HPC storage 
systems that has historically not been well-measured. Submitters are 
encouraged to share their tuning insights for publication.

The goals of the community are also multi-fold:
Gather historical data for the sake of analysis and to aid predictions 
of storage futures
Collect tuning information to share valuable performance optimizations 
across the community
Encourage vendors and designers to optimize for workloads beyond "hero 
runs"
Establish bounded expectations for users, procurers, and administrators

The IO500 follows a two-staged approach. First, there will be a two-week 
stabilization period during which we encourage the community to verify 
that the benchmark runs properly on a variety of storage systems. During 
this period the benchmark may be updated based upon feedback from the 
community. The final benchmark will then be released. We expect that 
runs compliant with the rules made during the stabilization period will 
be valid as a final submission unless a significant defect is found.

10 Node I/O Challenge
The 10 Node Challenge is conducted using the regular IO500 benchmark, 
however, with the rule that exactly 10 client nodes must be used to run 
the benchmark. You may use any shared storage with any number of 
servers. When submitting for the IO500 list, you can opt-in for 
"Participate in the 10 compute node challenge only", then we will not 
include the results into the ranked list. Other 10-node node submissions 
will be included in the full list and in the ranked list. We will 
announce the result in a separate derived list and in the full list but 
not on the ranked IO500 list at io500.org.

Birds-of-a-Feather
Once again, we encourage you to submit [2] to join our community, and to 
attend our BoF [1], where we will announce the new IO500 and 10 node 
challenge lists. The current list includes results from twenty different 
storage system types and 70 institutions. We hope that the upcoming list 
grows even more.

[1] https://io500.org/pages/bof-sc22
[2] https://io500.org/submission


-- 
The IO500 Committee