NSF CCF0938114
Visual Characterization of I/O System Behavior for High-End Computing
Principal Investigator: Kwan-Liu Ma, University of California at Davis
Co-Investigators: Pete Beckman and Kamil Iskra, University of Chicago
Period: September 15, 2009 - September 14, 2012
Project Summary
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.
NSF Award CCF-0938114
Other Participants
- Jason Cope, Postdoc, University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory
- Chris Muelder, PhD student
- Carmen Sigovan, PhD student
- Jeff Sukharev, PhD student
- Sam Lang (Collaborator), Argonne National Laboratory
- Robert Ross (Collaborator), Argonne National Laboratory
- David Skinner (Collaborator), Lawrence Berkelely National Laboratory
- Andrew Uselton (Collaborator), Lawrence Berkelely National Laboratory
Publications
- Chris W. Muelder et al. Visual Analysis of I/O System Behavior for High End Computing, in Proceedings of HDPC 2011 Workshop on Large-Scale System and Application Performance (LSAP). [pdf]
- C. Jones, R. Armstrong, and K.-L. Ma.
Visualizing the Commonalities between Hierarchically Structured Data Queries, in Proceedings of VLC (Visual Languages and Computing) 2010. [pdf]
- Chris W. Muelder, Fracois Gygi, and Kwan-Liu Ma. Visual Analysis of Inter-Process Communication for Large-Scale Parallel Computing, IEEE Transaction on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Volume 15, Number 6, November/December 2009, pp. 1129-1136. [pdf]
Acknowledgments
The materials presented at this website are based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0938114. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.