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Lessons Learned from Optimizing the Sunway Storage System for Higher Application I/O Performance

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Abstract

It is hard for applications to make full utilization of the peak bandwidth of the storage system in highperformance computers because of I/O interferences, storage resource misallocations and complex long I/O paths. We performed several studies to bridge this gap in the Sunway storage system, which serves the supercomputer Sunway TaihuLight. To locate these issues and connections between them, an end-to-end performance monitoring and diagnosis tool was developed to understand I/O behaviors of applications and the system. With the help of the tool, we were about to find out the root causes of such performance barriers at the I/O forwarding layer and the parallel file system layer. An application-aware I/O forwarding allocation framework was used to address the I/O interferences and resource misallocations at the I/O forwarding layer. A performance-aware data placement mechanism was proposed to mitigate the impact of I/O interferences and performance variations of storage devices in the PFS. Together, applications obtained much better I/O performance. During the process, we also proposed a lightweight storage stack to shorten the I/O path of applications with -N I/O pattern. This paper summarizes these studies and presents the lessons learned from the process.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology (BNRist), Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Qi Chen, Kang Chen, Wei Xue & Xu Ji

  2. Chinese Academy of Engineering, Beijing, 100088, China

    Zuo-Ning Chen

  3. National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, Wuxi, 214100, China

    Xu Ji & Bin Yang

  4. School of Software, Shandong University, Jinan, 250101, China

    Bin Yang

Authors
  1. Qi Chen
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  2. Kang Chen
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  3. Zuo-Ning Chen
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  4. Wei Xue
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  5. Xu Ji
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Correspondence to Qi Chen.

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Chen, Q., Chen, K., Chen, ZN. et al. Lessons Learned from Optimizing the Sunway Storage System for Higher Application I/O Performance. J. Comput. Sci. Technol. 35, 47–60 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-020-9798-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-020-9798-5

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