Revisiting I/O bandwidth-sharing strategies for HPC applications

This work revisits I/O bandwidth-sharing strategies for HPC applications. When several applications post concurrent I/O operations, well-known approaches include serializing these operations (First-Come First-Served) or fair-sharing the bandwidth across them (FairShare). Another recent approach, I/O-Sets, assigns priorities to the applications, which are classified into different sets based upon the average length of their iterations. We introduce several new bandwidth-sharing strategies, some of them simple greedy algorithms, and some of them more complicated to implement, and we compare them with existing ones. Our new strategies do not rely on any a-priori knowledge of the behavior of the applications, such as the length of work phases, the volume of I/O operations, or some expected periodicity. We introduce a rigorous framework, namely steady-state windows, which enables to derive bounds on the competitive ratio of all bandwidth-sharing strategies for three different objectives: minimum yield, platform utilization, and global efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to provide a quantitative assessment of the online competitiveness of any bandwidth-sharing strategy. This theory-oriented assessment is complemented by a comprehensive set of simulations, based upon both synthetic and realistic traces. The main conclusion is that our simple and low-complexity greedy strategies significantly outperform First-Come First-Served, FairShare and I/O-Sets, and we recommend that the I/O community implements them for further assessment.