A Multi-purpose, Application-Centric, Scalable I/O Proxy Application
MACSio is being developed to fill a long existing void in co-design proxy applications that allow for I/O performance testing and evaluation of tradeoffs in data models, I/O library interfaces and parallel I/O paradigms for multi-physics, HPC applications.
Two key design features of MACSio set it apart from existing I/O proxy applications and benchmarking tools. The first is the level of abstraction (LOA) at which MACSio is being designed to operate. The second is the degree of flexibility MACSio is being designed to provide in driving an HPC I/O workload through parameterized, user-defined data objects and a variety of parallel I/O paradigms and I/O interfaces.
Combined, these features allow MACSio to closely mimic I/O workloads for a wide variety of real applications and, in particular, multi-physics applications where data object distribution and composition vary dramatically both within and across parallel tasks. These data objects can then be marshaled using one or more I/O interfaces and parallel I/O paradigms, allowing for direct comparisons of software interfaces, parallel I/O paradigms, and file system technologies with the same set of customizable data objects.
We hope MACSio helps the HPC community to identify ways of maximizing I/O performance at scale.
The name "MACSio" is pronounced max-eee-oh.