IO-Sets: Simple and Efficient Approaches for I/O Bandwidth Management

One of the main performance issues faced by high-performance computing platforms is the congestion caused by concurrent I/O from applications. When this happens, the platform's overall performance and utilization are harmed. From the extensive work in this field, I/O scheduling is the essential solution to this problem. The main drawback of current techniques is the amount of information needed about applications, which compromises their applicability. In this paper, we propose a novel method for I/O management,
IO-Sets
. We present its potential through a scheduling heuristic called
Set-10
, which is simple and requires only minimal information. Our extensive experimental campaign shows the importance of
IO-Sets
and the robustness of
Set-10
under various workloads. In particular in most of the simulated scenarios we improve the I/O slowdown over fairshare by 50%, which corresponds in our scenarios to a platform utilization gain of 2.5%. In the practical scenarios that we did, the utilization gain varies between 10 and 30%. We also provide insights on using our proposal in practice.