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Lockwood, Glenn K.

Publications and source records attributed to Lockwood, Glenn K..

Architecture and performance of Perlmutter's 35 PB ClusterStor E1000 all-flash file system

NERSC's newest system, Perlmutter, features a 35 PB all-flash Lustre file system built on HPE Cray ClusterStor E1000. Here, we present its architecture, early performance figures, and performance considerations unique to this architecture. We demonstrate the performance of E1000 OSSes through low-level Lustre tests that achieve over 90% of the theoretical bandwidth of the SSDs at the OST and LNet levels. We also show end-to-end performance for both traditional dimensions of I/O performance (peak bulk-synchronous bandwidth) and nonoptimal workloads endemic to production computing (small, incoherent I/Os at random offsets) and compare them to NERSC's previous system, Cori, to illustrate that Perlmutter achieves the performance of a burst buffer and the resilience of a scratch file system. Finally, we discuss performance considerations unique to all-flash Lustre and present ways in which users and HPC facilities can adjust their I/O patterns and operations to make optimal use of such architectures.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

An empirical study of I/O separation for burst buffers in HPC systems

To meet the exascale I/O requirements for the High-Performance Computing (HPC), a new I/O subsystem, Burst Buffer, based on solid state drives (SSD), has been developed. However, the diverse HPC workloads and the bursty I/O pattern cause severe data fragmentation that requires costly garbage collection (GC) and increases the number of bytes written to the SSD. To address this data fragmentation challenge, a new multi-stream feature has been developed for SSDs. In this work, we develop an I/O Separation scheme called BIOS to leverage this multi-stream feature to group the I/O streams based on the user IDs. We propose a stream-aware scheduling policy based on burst buffer pools in the workload manager, and integrate the BIOS with the workload manager to optimize the I/O separation scheme in burst buffer. We evaluate the proposed framework with a burst buffer I/O traces from Cori Supercomputer including a diverse set of applications. Experimental results show that the BIOS could improve the performance by 1.44x on average and reduce the Write Amplification Factor (WAF) by up to 1.20x. Finally, these demonstrate the potential benefits of the I/O separation scheme for solid state storage systems.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Uncovering Access, Reuse, and Sharing Characteristics of I/O-Intensive Files on Large-Scale Production HPC Systems

Large-scale high-performance computing (HPC) applications running on supercomputers produce large amounts of data routinely and store it in files on multi-PB shared parallel storage systems. Unfortunately, storage community has a limited understanding of the access and reuse patterns of these files. This paper investigates the access and reuse patterns of I/O-intensive files on a production-scale supercomputer.

Patel, Tirthak↗