This reproducibility report provides details about the artifact evaluation done with regards to the Artifact Description and Evaluation appendix of the SC25 paper “STZ: A High Quality and High Speed Streaming Lossy Compression Framework for Scientific Data” by Zhao et al. The work was done as part of the Reproducibility Initiative of SC25. The author is a member of the SC25 Reproducibilty Committee.

With the increase of complex scientific simulations driven by workflows and heterogeneous workload profiles, managing system resources effectively is essential for improving performance and system throughput, especially due to trends like heterogeneous HPC and deeply integrated systems with on-chip accelerators. For optimal resource utilization, dynamic resource allocation can improve productivity across all system and application levels, by adapting the applications' configurations to the system's resources. In this context, malleable jobs, which can change resources at runtime, can increase the system throughput and resource utilization while bringing various advantages for HPC users (e.g., shorter waiting time). Malleability has received much attention recently, even though it has been an active research area for almost two decades [1]. This paper presents the state-of-the-art of malleable implementations in HPC systems, targeting mainly malleability in compute and I/O resources. Based on our experiences, we state our current concerns and list future opportunities for research.

The main objective of the ADMIRE project1 is the creation of an active I/O stack that dynamically adjusts computation and storage requirements through intelligent global coordination, the elasticity of computation and I/O, and the scheduling of storage resources along all levels of the storage hierarchy, while offering quality-of-service (QoS), energy efficiency, and resilience for accessing extremely large data sets in very heterogeneous computing and storage environments. We have developed a framework prototype that is able to dynamically adjust computation and storage requirements through intelligent global coordination, separated control, and data paths, the malleability of computation and I/O, the scheduling of storage resources along all levels of the storage hierarchy, and scalable monitoring techniques. The leading idea in ADMIRE is to co-design applications with ad-hoc storage systems that can be deployed with the application and adapt their computing and I/O behaviour on runtime, using malleability techniques, to increase the performance of applications and the throughput of the applications.

Directory tree walks on parallel file systems are costly operations frequently required by many storage management tasks. Even listing the contents of a single directory can take minutes to hours for huge directories, as the tree walk performance of parallel file systems in Linux is severely throttled by sequentially accessing distributed metadata for each file through the syscall interface.

In parallel and distributed file systems, caching can improve data performance and metadata operations. Currently, most distributed file systems adopt a write-back data cache for performance and a write-through metadata cache for simplifying consistency. However, with modern file systems scales and workloads, write-through metadata caching can impact overall file system performance, e.g., through lock contention and heavy RPC loads required for namespace synchronization and transaction serialization. This paper proposes a novel metadata write-back caching (MetaWBC) mechanism to improve the performance of metadata operations in distributed environments. To achieve extreme metadata performance, we developed a fast, lightweight, and POSIXcompatible memory file system as a metadata cache. Further, we designed a file caching state machine and included other performance optimizations. We coupled MetaWbc with Lustre and evaluated that MetaWbc can outperform the native parallel file system by up to 8x for metadata-intensive benchmarks, and up to 7x for realistic workloads in throughput.

With evolving techniques to parallelize Deep Learning (DL) and the growing amount of training data and model complexity, High-Performance Computing (HPC) has become increasingly important for machine learning engineers. Although many compute clusters already use learning accelerators or GPUs, HPC storage systems are not suitable for the I/O requirements of DL workflows. Therefore, users typically copy the whole training data to the worker nodes or distribute partitions. Because DL depends on randomized input data, prior work stated that partitioning impacts DL accuracy. Their solutions focused mainly on training I/O performance on a high-speed network but did not cover the data stage-in process, for example. We show in this paper that, in practice, (unbiased) partitioning is not harmful for distributed DL accuracy. Nevertheless, manual partitioning can be error prone and inefficient. Typically, data must be unpacked and shuffled before it is distributed to nodes. We propose a solution that features both: efficient stage-in and fast access to a global namespace to prevent biases. Our architecture is based around an ad hoc storage system relying on a high-speed interconnect allowing an efficient stage-in of DL data sets into a single global namespace. Our proposed solution does not limit access to parts of the data set or relies on data duplication, also relieving the HPC storage system. We obtain high I/O performance during training and ensure minimal interference with communication of the learning workers. The optimizations are transparent to DL applications and their accuracy is not affected by our architecture.

Data-driven applications are becoming increasingly important in numerous industrial and scientific fields, growing the need for scalable data storage, such as object storage. Yet, many data-driven applications cannot use object interfaces directly and often have to rely on third-party file system connectors that support only a basic representation of objects as files in a flat namespace. With sometimes millions of objects per bucket, this simple organization is insufficient for users and applications who are usually only interested in a small subset of objects. These huge buckets are not only lacking basic semantic properties and structure, but they are also challenging to manage from a technical perspective as object store file systems cannot cope with such directory sizes. DelveFS is the first object store file system that solves this challenge by offering the ability to compose a custom semantic file system that allows multiple unique views onto the object store. Through flexible filters, users can specify each view's content, tailored to their unique interests or an application's requirements. By processing object store events which describe changes in the object store, DelveFS is able to keep all views eventually consistent. DelveFS allows to operate concurrently through the object and file system interfaces on the same set of objects, delivering similar file system throughput compared to the native object store interfaces or other file system connectors. DelveFS is the first object store file system that solves this challenge by offering the ability to compose a custom semantic file system that allows multiple unique views onto the object store. Through flexible filters, users can specify each view's content, tailored to their unique interests or an application's requirements. By processing object store events which describe changes in the object store, DelveFS is able to keep all views eventually consistent. DelveFS allows to operate concurrently through the object and file system interfaces on the same set of objects, delivering similar file system throughput compared to the native object store interfaces or other file system connectors.

We present GekkoFS, a temporary, highly-scalable burst buffer file system which has been specifically optimized for new access patterns of data-intensive High-Performance Computing (HPC) applications. The file system provides relaxed POSIX semantics, only offering features which are actually required by most (not all) applications. It is able to provide scalable I/O performance and reaches millions of metadata operations already for a small number of nodes, significantly outperforming the capabilities of general-purpose parallel file systems.

IBM Spectrum Scale’s parallel file system General Parallel File System (GPFS) has a 20-year development history with over 100 contributing developers. Its ability to support strict POSIX semantics across more than 10K clients leads to a complex design with intricate interactions between the cluster nodes. Tracing has proven to be a vital tool to understand the behavior and the anomalies of such a complex software product. However, the necessary trace information is often buried in hundreds of gigabytes of by-product trace records. Further, the overhead of tracing can significantly impact running applications and file system performance, limiting the use of tracing in a production system. In this research article, we discuss the evolution of the mature and highly scalable GPFS tracing tool and present the exploratory study of GPFS’ new tracing interface, FlexTrace , which allows developers and users to accurately specify what to trace for the problem they are trying to solve. We evaluate our methodology and prototype, demonstrating that the proposed approach has negligible overhead, even under intensive I/O workloads and with low-latency storage devices.

The need for parallel task execution has been steadily growing in recent years since manufacturers mainly improve processor performance by scaling the number of installed cores instead of the frequency of processors. To make use of this potential, an essential technique to increase the parallelism of a program is to parallelize loops. However, a main restriction of available tools for automatic loop parallelization is that the loops often have to be 'polyhedral' and that it is, e.g., not allowed to call functions from within the loops. In this paper, we present a seemingly simple extension to the C programming language which marks functions without side-effects. These functions can then basically be ignored when checking the parallelization opportunities for polyhedral loops. We extended the GCC compiler toolchain accordingly and evaluated several real-world applications showing that our extension helps to identify additional parallelization chances and, thus, to significantly enhance the performance of applications.