I/O Scheduling for Limited-Size Burst-Buffers Deployed High Performance Computing

Abstract

Burst-Buffers is a high throughput, small size intermediate storage system integrated between computing nodes and permanent storage system to mitigate the I/O bottleneck problem in modern High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms. This system, however, is unable to effectively handle variable-intensity I/O bursts resulted by unpredictable concurrent accesses to the shared Parallel File System (PFS). In this paper, we introduce a probabilistic I/O scheduling method that takes into account of the burst-buffer load state and instantaneous I/O load distribution of the system based on the probabilistic model of applications to relieve the I/O congestion when I/O load exceeds the PFS bandwidth caused by dynamic application interference. The proposed scheduling method for limited-size Burst-Buffers deployed HPC platforms makes online decision of probabilistic selection of concurrent I/O requests for going through (to PFS), buffering (to Burst-Buffers) or declination in accordance to both the available I/O bandwidth and the current buffer state in order to maximize system efficiency or minimize application dilation. Extensive experiment results on actual characteristic synthetic data show that our method handles the I/O congestion effectively.