SERA-IO: Integrating Energy Consciousness into Parallel I/O Middleware

Improving energy efficiency is a primary concern in high performance computing system design. Because I/O accesses account for a large portion of the execution time for data intensive applications, energy-aware parallel I/O subsystems are critical for addressing challenges related to HPC energy efficiency. In this paper, we present an energy-conscious parallel I/O middleware approach that combines runtime I/O access interception and Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling capability available on modern processors to intelligently schedule the system´s power-performance mode for energy savings. We implement this approach into SERA-IO, an MPI-IO based middleware to enable energy consciousness for I/O intensive applications. Experimental evaluations conducted on real systems using multiple parallel I/O benchmarks show that SERA-IO can reduce system energy by 9% to 28% without decreasing application performance. With the emerging of large-scale data intensive applications and ever larger and more complex parallel computing systems, intelligent, energy conscious software and runtime systems such as SERA-IO are critical for the success of future high-end computing.