HPIS3: Towards a High-Performance Simulator for Hybrid Parallel I/O and Storage Systems

The performance gap between processor and storage device has continuously increased during the past few decades. The gap is further exacerbated recently because applications are becoming more data-intensive in both industry and academia. Traditional storage devices, such as hard disk drives (HDD), fail to keep up with the paces of this growth. A known solution is to use solid state drives (SSD) as fast storage. Due to high cost of SSD, data and supercomputing centers usually adopt a hybrid storage system, which consists of a combination of HDD and SSD I/O servers. However, hybrid I/O and storage systems have increased the complexity, making SSD often underutilized. The configuration and utilization of HDD/SSD hybrid systems is a lasting phenomenon. In this study, we propose a high performance hybrid parallel I/O and storage simulator, HPIS3. As a co-design tool, HPIS3 is capable of simulating a variety of parallel storage systems, especially under hybrid scenarios. The experimental results show that the lowest error rate is 2%, and the average is 11.98%.