Server-Side Workload Identification for HPC I/O Requests

In this paper, we develop a method to identify High Performance Computing (HPC) workloads from a stream of incoming I/O requests. This characterization of workloads could then be used to intelligently schedule the I/O requests in the parallel file system (PFS) that most HPC systems use. We use a deep learning model for this purpose that is designed to pick up changes in the workload as they occur. We show that our method accurately determines the workload characteristics when evaluated on publicly available server-side HPC traces. We also show that the I/O scheduling based on such a characterization can substantially increase the available I/O bandwidth and thus reduce the latencies for the HPC workloads.