Probabilistic scheduling of dynamic I/O requests via application clustering for burst-buffers equipped high-performance computing

Burst-buffering is a promising storage solution that introduces an intermediate high-throughput storage buffer layer to mitigate the I/O bottleneck problem that the current high-performance computing (HPC) platforms suffer. The existing Markov-Chain based probabilistic I/O scheduling utilizes the load state of burst-buffers and the periodic characteristics of applications to reduce I/O congestion due to the limited capacity of burst-buffers. However, this probabilistic approach requires consistent I/O characteristics of applications, including similar I/O duration and long application length, in order to obtain an accurate I/O load estimation. These consistency conditions do not often hold in realistic situations. In this paper, we propose a generic framework of dynamic probabilistic I/O scheduling based on application clustering (DPSAC) to make applications meet the consistency requirements. According to the I/O phase length of each application, our scheme first deploys a one-dimensional K-means clustering algorithm to cluster the applications into clusters. Next, it calculates the expected workload of each cluster through the probabilistic model of applications and then partitions the burst-buffers proportionally. Then, to handle dynamic changes (join and exit) of applications, it updates the clusters based on a heuristic strategy. Finally, it applies the probabilistic I/O scheduling, which is based on the distribution of application workload and the state of burst-buffers, to schedule I/O for all the concurrent applications to mitigate I/O congestion. The simulation results on synthetic data show that our DPSAC is effective and efficient.