Visual Characterization of I/O System Behavior for High-End Computing

University Of California-Davis, Davis CA

Investigators

Abstract

Modern supercomputers are complex, hierarchical systems consisting of huge numbers of cores, systems for disk storage, and nodes for I/O forwarding. These numbers continue to grow and the need for tools to understand the behavior of the system software becomes paramount: without these tools it is impossible to effectively tune that software, and high degrees of efficiency is unattainable by applications. This project addresses the challenge of understanding the behavior of complex system software on very large-scale compute platforms, like the current petascale computers. In particular, this project is developing software infrastructure to provide end-to-end analysis and visualization of I/O system software. Specifically, the objectives are to develop, improve, and deploy (1) end-to-end, scalable tracing integrated into the I/O system (MPI-IO, I/O forwarding, and file system); (2) information visualization tools for inspecting traces and extracting knowledge; (3) testing components that drive this system to generate example patterns, including a component to generate anomalies; and (4) tutorials and tools for helping other system software developers incorporate this analysis and visualization system into their production software. The software and techniques developed in this project will be directly applicable to and useful in other system software libraries which perform complex interactions on large systems. For further information see the project web site at the URL: http://vis.cs.ucdavis.edu/NSF/Jupiter