ML-based Modeling to Predict I/O Performance on Different Storage Sub-systems

Parallel applications can spend a significant amount of time performing I/O on large-scale supercomputers. Fast near-compute storage accelerators called burst buffers can reduce the time a processor spends performing I/O and mitigate I/O bottlenecks. However, determining if a given application could be accelerated using burst buffers is not straightforward even for storage experts. The relationship between an application's I/O characteristics (such as I/O volume, processes involved, etc.) and the best storage sub-system for it can be complicated. As a result, adapting parallel applications to use burst buffers efficiently is a trial-and-error process. In this work, we present a Python-based tool called PrismIO that enables programmatic analysis of I/O traces. Using PrismIO, we identify performance bottlenecks when using burst buffers and parallel file systems, and explain why certain I/O patterns perform poorly. Further, we use machine learning to model the relationship between I/O characteristics and file system selections. We use IOR, an I/O benchmark to gather performance data for training the machine learning model. Our model can predict the better performing storage system for unseen IOR scenarios with an accuracy of 94.47% and for four real applications with an accuracy of 95.86%.