Workshop: Understanding I/O Performance Behavior (UIOP)

Understanding I/O performance behavior is crucial to optimize I/O-intense applications but also the infrastructure of data centers. However, with the dawn of new technologies such as NVRAM, burst-buffers, active storage/function shipping, and network attached memory, the complexity of storage infrastructure increases significantly and the boundary between memory and storage blurs. During the procurement of new systems, data centers have to ensure that the application's needs are met. Therefore, they need to define the proper requirements for storage and provide I/O benchmarks that represent application workloads to quantify and verify I/O performance.

The main goal of the workshop is the discussion of tools to identify (in-)efficient usage of I/O resources on modern storage subsystems from the perspective of users and data centers.

The workshop covers:

1. a discussion of design alternatives of storage architectures and their implications on user workflows;
2. telemetry and monitoring information necessary to enable efficient performance optimization of system and applications;
3. the development of representative benchmarks resembling the applications' needs.

The discussion of alternative storage architectures lays the foundation for the requirements of the monitoring and benchmarking efforts. Speakers involved in storage and file system research will present experience in alternative storage architectures, application workflows, monitoring tools to identify bottlenecks in I/O, and (benchmarking) tools to quantify I/O performance. Scientists involved in various application domains can give an introduction to their workflows and I/O requirements.

By bringing together application developers/users and I/O experts, we support the development of tools to identify and quantify I/O inefficiencies that support users and data centers.