Improving the I/O Performance of Applications with Predictive Modeling based Auto-tuning

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Abstract
Parallel I/O is an essential part of scientific applications running on high performance computing systems. Typically, parallel I/O stacks offer many parameters that need to be tuned to achieve the best possible I/O performance. Unfortunately, there is no default best configuration of parameters; in practice, these differ not only between systems but often also from one application use-case to the other. However, scientific users often do not have the time nor the experience to explore the parameter space sensibly and choose the proper configuration for each application use-case. This paper proposes an auto-tuning approach based on I/O monitoring and predictive modeling, which can find a good set of I/O parameter values on a given system and application use-case. We demonstrate the feasibility to auto-tune parameters related to the Lustre file system and the MPI-IO ROMIO library transparently to the user. In particular, the model predicts for a given I/O pattern the best configuration from a history of I/O usages. We have validated the model with two I/O benchmarks, namely IOR and MPI-Tile-IO, and a real Molecular Dynamics code, namely ls1 Mardyn. We achieve an increase of I/O bandwidth by a factor of up to 18 over the default parameters for collective I/O in the IOR and a factor of up to 5 for the non-contiguous I/O in the MPI-Tile-IO. Finally, we obtain an improvement of check-point writing time over the default parameters of up to 32 in ls1 Mardyn.

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