Paper Review of Profiling Platform Storage Using IO500 and Mistral

Paper Summary

This study investigates how to use IO500 and the Ellexus Mistral tool to analyze precise performance characteristics in order to tune IO performance on Astra, an ARM-based Sandia machine with an all flash, Lustre-based storage array. This article proves, through this case study, that IO500 serves as a valid storage benchmark, even for all flash storage. This research also demonstrates the need of employing fine-grained profiling tools such as Mistral for discovering tuning demand specifics. Overall, this study highlights the utility of a wide spectrum benchmark, such as IO500, in conjunction with a fine-grained performance analysis tool, such as Mistral, for understanding particular storage system performance and making more informed tuning decisions.

Pros and Cons

Pros

This article implements IO500 on a new device (AArch64).

Cons

This article lack of the experiments with other distributed file systems.

Brain Storm

Using a comparable system metrics monitor to debug HPC programs is an excellent method, but it requires significant system and hardware support.