[Storage-research-list] CFS IO500 ISC'25 Deadline 2 June 2025

[IO500 Committee]

Call for Submission
Submission Deadline: June 2nd, 2025 AoE
The IO500 is now accepting and encouraging submissions for the upcoming 
16th semi-annual IO500 Production and Research lists, in conjunction 
with ISC25. We are also accepting submissions to both the Production and 
Research 10 Client Node Challenges to encourage the submission of small 
scale results. View the requirements for submitting to each list on the 
IO500 Webpage. The new ranked lists will be announced at the BoF [1]. We 
look forward to seeing many new results!

Background
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 benchmarks represent community accepted 
standards, including being used in Request for Proposals for new HPC 
platforms. The benchmarks showcase the IO access pattern extremes giving 
a full picture of storage system potential performance. 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.

The multi-fold goals of the benchmark suite are as follows:
Represent naive and optimized access patterns for the execution of a 
rich variety of HPC  applications, their achievable performance and the 
documentation of how the numbers are achieved.
Support small to extreme-scale Research and Production HPC systems using 
flexible storage APIs
Maximizing simplicity in running the benchmark suite while offering 
tunable parameters
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 runs 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. Supported Storage APIs are 
those that are part of IOR and mdtest. Extending these tools with a 
public pull request can be done to enable new storage APIs.

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
Understand and be able to reproduce performance on storage systems
Using the IO500 Reproducibility guidelines, each submission is labeled 
according to the breadth of details provided and the access to the 
deployed storage software that enables the community to reproduce the 
results and study system design changes over time.

Benchmark Changes
This year, we have added a 4KiB random read test phase at the end of the 
benchmark suite. By default, this phase will also run, but will not be 
included in the score nor affect if the score is valid or not. If this 
causes problems, it is possible to turn this off in the configuration 
file. Entries without this result will not be penalized. We will have 
the traditional two-week stabilization period. Unless a serious flaw is 
discovered, results submitted during stabilization will be considered 
for this event.

The detailed information about the new phase can be read here: 4KiB 
Random Read [3]
10 Client Node I/O Challenge
The 10 Client 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. We will announce the results in the Production and 
Research lists as well as in separate derived lists.

Birds-of-a-Feather
We encourage you to submit [2] to join our community, and to attend the 
ISC'25 BoF [1] on Tuesday, Nov 19, 2024 at 12:15pm - 1:15pm EST, where 
we will announce the new IO500 Production and Research lists and their 
10 Client Node counterparts.

Be Part of the Community
Submissions of all sizes are welcome; the webpage has customizable 
sorting, so it is possible to submit on a small system and still get a 
very good per-client score, for example. We will also highlight new and 
interesting results with invited talk(s) at the BoF.
[1] https://io500.org/pages/bof-isc25
[2] https://io500.org/submission
[3] 
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zr88byIhNIhVXp6KN6v4zGB828oNs2LDZSbIj-3zGpc/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.logz761yklv8

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The IO500 Committee