Effective IO Bandwidth b_eff_io Benchmark

It covers two goals:
  1. achieve a characteristic average number for the I/O bandwidth achievable with parallel MPI-I/O applications
  2. get detailed information about several access patterns and buffer lengths. The benchmark examines "first write", "rewrite" and "read" access, strided (individual and shared pointers) and segmented collective patterns on one file per application and non-collective access to one file per process. The number of parallel accessing processes is also varied and wellformed I/O is compared with non-wellformed. On systems, meeting the rule that the total memory can be written to disk in 10 minutes, the benchmark should not need more than 15 minutes for a first pass of all patterns. The benchmark is designed analogously to the effective bandwidth benchmark for message passing (b_eff) that characterizes the message passing capabilities of a system in a few minutes.

The Latest Releases

Latest publications:

Usage

Installation and the first test

CAUTION: Because this first test is scheduled with only 60 seconds, the results will never tell you anything about the I/O bandwidth of your system. The test only should tell you whether the benchmark is running on your system.

To get a first b_eff_io impression The official execution of b_eff_io
The b_eff_io benchmark has to be done with three mandatory and one optional number of processes:
Publishing the results
Now, you can publish these four b_eff_io values together with all commands and parameters you have used to run these benchmarks and together with the protocol files (my_system_..._1800sec.prot) and the summary files (my_system_..._1800sec.sum). The Top Cluster initiative of the TFCC Open Forum has nominated this benchmark for evaluating the I/O performance of clusters (see discussion archive).
It is planned to include the b_eff_io results into the TOPClusters list.

References

[1]
Karl Solchenbach: Benchmarking the Balance of Parallel Computers. SPEC Workshop on Benchmarking Parallel and High-Performance Computing Systems (copy of the slides), Wuppertal, Germany, Sept. 13, 1999.
[2]
Karl Solchenbach, Hans-Joachim Plum and Gero Ritzenhoefer: Pallas Effective Bandwidth Benchmark - source code and sample results ( EFF_BW.tar.gz , 43 KB)
[3]
Rolf Hempel: Basic message passing benchmarks, methodology and pitfalls. SPEC Workshop on Benchmarking Parallel and High-Performance Computing Systems ( copy of the slides ), Wuppertal, Germany, Sept. 13, 1999.
[4]
William Gropp and Ewing Lusk: Reproducible Measurement of MPI Performance Characteristics. In J. Dongarra et al. (eds.), Recent Advances in Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface, proceedings of the 6th European PVM/MPI Users' Group Meeting, EuroPVM/MPI'99, Barcelona, Spain, Sept. 26-29, 1999, LNCS 1697, pp 11-18. (Summary on the web)

Links