iez: Resource Contention Aware Load Balancing for Large-Scale Parallel File Systems

Parallel I/O performance is crucial to sustaining scientific applications on large-scale High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems. However, I/O load imbalance in the underlying distributed and shared storage systems can significantly reduce overall application performance. There are two conflicting challenges to mitigate this load imbalance: (i) optimizing system-wide data placement to maximize the bandwidth advantages of distributed storage servers, i.e., allocating I/O resources efficiently across applications and job runs; and (ii) optimizing client-centric data movement to minimize I/O load request latency between clients and servers, i.e., allocating I/O resources efficiently in service to a single application and job run. Moreover, existing approaches that require application changes limit wide-spread adoption in commercial or proprietary deployments. We propose iez, an "end-to-end control plane" where clients transparently and adaptively write to a set of selected I/O servers to achieve balanced data placement. Our control plane leverages real-time load information for distributed storage server global data placement while our design model leverages trace-based optimization techniques to minimize I/O load request latency between clients and servers. We evaluate our proposed system on an experimental cluster for two common use cases: synthetic I/O benchmark IOR for large sequential writes and a scientific application I/O kernel, HACC-I/O. Results show read and write performance improvements of up to 34% and 32%, respectively, compared to the state of the art.