An Experimental Study of Input/Output Characteristics of NASA Earth and Space Sciences Applications

Abstract * Parallel input/output (I/O) workload characterization studies are necessary to better understand the factors that dominate performance. When translated into system design principles this knowledge can lead to higher performance/cost systems. In this paper we present the experimental results of an I/O workload characterization study of NASA Earth and Space Sciences (ESS) applications. Measurements were collected using device driver instrumentation. Baseline measurements, with no workload, and measurements during regular application runs, were collected and then analyzed and correlated. It will be shown how the observed disk I/O can be identified as block transfers, page requests, and cache activity, and how the ESS applications are characterized by a high degree of spatial and temporal locality. 1

An Experimental Study of Input/Output Characteristics of NASA Earth and Space Sciences Applications

Parallel input/output (I/O) worklaod characterization studies are necessary to understanding the workload behaviors that dominate performance. This can translate into design principles and considerations that lead to high performance/cost implementations, by giving priority to the resource needs of these important factors. In this paper we present experimental results of an I/O workload characterization study of NASA Earth and Space Sciences (ESS) applications. The working set of applications used in this study included PPM and Nbody codes, used for astrophysics simulations, and Wavelet Decomposition code, used as the basis for satellite image registeration at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Measurements were collected using device driver instrumentation. This allows monitoring the real workload as experienced by the underlying I/O subsystems. Baseline measurements, with no application workload applied, as well as measurements during regular application runs were collected. Those mea..