LuxIO: Intelligent Resource Provisioning and Auto-Configuration for Storage Services

Abstract

Storage in HPC is typically a single Remote and Static Storage (RSS) resource. However, applications demonstrate diverse I/O requirements that can be better served by a multi-storage approach. Current practice employs ephemeral storage systems running on either node-local or shared storage resources. Yet, the burden of provisioning and configuring intermediate storage falls solely on the users, while global job schedulers offer little to no support for custom deployments. This lack of support often leads to over- or under-provisioning of resources and poorly configured storage systems. To mitigate this, we present LuxIO, an intelligent storage resource provisioning and auto-configuration service. LuxIO constructs storage deployments configured to best match I/O requirements. LuxIO-tuned storage services show performance improvements up to 2× across common applications and benchmarks, while introducing minimal overhead of 93.40 ms on top of existing job scheduling pipelines. LuxIO improves resource utilization by up to 25% in select workflows.