Hello Lustre community,

After BoFs at last year's SC and the last two ISC's, the IO-500 is formalized 
and is now accepting submissions in preparation for our first IO-500 list at 
this year's SC BoF:
http://sc17.supercomputing.org/presentation/?id=bof108&sess=sess319

The goal of the IO-500 is simple: to improve parallel file systems by ensuring 
that sites publish results of both "hero" and "anti-hero" runs and by sharing 
the tuning and configuration they applied to achieve those results.

After receiving feedback from a few trial users, the framework is significantly 
improved:
> git clone https://github.com/VI4IO/io-500-dev
> cd io-500-dev
> ./utilities/prepare.sh
> ./io500.sh
> # tune and rerun
> # email results to [email protected]

This, perhaps with a bit of tweaking and please consult our 'doc' directory for 
troubleshooting, should get a very small toy problem up and running quickly.  
It then does become a bit challenging to tune the problem size as well as the 
underlying file system configuration (e.g. striping parameters) to get a valid, 
and impressive, result.  

The basic format of the benchmark is to run both a "hero" and "antihero" IOR 
test as well as a "hero" and "antihero" mdtest.  The write/create phase of 
these tests must last for at least five minutes to ensure that the test is not 
measuring cache speeds.

One of the more challenging aspects is that there is a requirement to search 
through the metadata of the files that this benchmark creates.  Currently we 
provide a simple serial version of this test (i.e. the GNU find command) as 
well as a simple python MPI parallel tree walking program.  Even with the MPI 
program, the find can take an extremely long amount of time to finish.  You are 
encouraged to replace these provided tools with anything of your own devise 
that satisfies the required functionality.  This is one area where we 
particularly hope to foster innovation as we have heard from many file system 
admins that metadata search in current parallel file systems can be painfully 
slow.

Now is your chance to show the community just how awesome we all know Lustre to 
be.  We are excited to introduce this benchmark and foster this community.  We 
hope you give the benchmark a try and join our community if you haven't 
already.  Please let us know right away in any of our various communications 
channels (as described in our documentation) if you encounter any problems with 
the benchmark or have questions about tuning or have suggestions for others.  

We hope to see your results in email and to see you in person at the SC BoF.

Thanks,

IO 500 Committee
John Bent, Julian Kunkle, Jay Lofstead
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