Characterizing I/O workloads of HPC applications through online analysis

The performance of storage subsystem of super-computers can not meet the demands of complex applications running on them. One of its major causes is that the bandwidth of storage hardware has not been utilized efficiently due to the complex and changing application I/O behavior. Therefore, I/O characterization tools are vital to application development and orchestration of storage system. This paper proposes an I/O characterization tool called FTracer. It captures I/O traces and performs traces analysis at runtime. In order to provide more flexible analysis, this FTracer allows users to vary the analysis instances at runtime. This mechanism ensures users get what exactly they want about the I/O characteristics of their applications when applications are running. In this work, we characterize MADbench2 benchmark to demonstrate the ability of FTracer.