Abstract
While parallel file systems often satisfy the need of applications with bulk synchronous I/O, they lack capabilities of dealing with metadata intense workloads. Typically, in procurements, the focus lies on the aggregated metadata throughput using the MDTest benchmark (https://www.vi4io.org/tools/benchmarks/mdtest). However, metadata performance is crucial for interactive use. Metadata benchmarks involve even more parameters compared to I/O benchmarks. There are several aspects that are currently uncovered and, therefore, not in the focus of vendors to investigate. Particularly, response latency and interactive workloads operating on a working set of data. The lack of capabilities from file systems can be observed when looking at the IO-500 list, where metadata performance between best and worst system does not differ significantly.
In this paper, we introduce a new benchmark called MDWorkbench which generates a reproducible workload emulating many concurrent users or – in an alternative view – queuing systems. This benchmark provides a detailed latency profile, overcomes caching issues, and provides a method to assess the quality of the observed throughput. We evaluate the benchmark on state-of-the-art parallel file systems with GPFS (IBM Spectrum Scale), Lustre, Cray’s Datawarp, and DDN IME, and conclude that we can reveal characteristics that could not be identified before.
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MDWorkbench is available under: https://github.com/JulianKunkel/md-workbench.
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A backend like MPI-IO may implement this operation as NoOp if it is not supported.
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This value is used in the IO-500 benchmark as it prevents inode stuffing; for comparison, we choose it.
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The plot is sparse, e.g., 100k data points of 1 million creates have been randomly selected. Additionally, all measurements about 0.1 s have been added.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks for DDN providing access to their facility and the discussion with Jean-Thomas Acquaviva and Jay Lofstead. This research used resources of the KAUST Supercomputing Core Laboratory, of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility and NERSC, which are under DOE Office of Science User Facilities supported under Contract DE-AC02-06CH11357 and DE-AC02-05CH11231 respectively.
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Kunkel, J.M., Markomanolis, G.S. (2018). Understanding Metadata Latency with MDWorkbench. In: Yokota, R., Weiland, M., Shalf, J., Alam, S. (eds) High Performance Computing. ISC High Performance 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11203. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02465-9_5
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