[gpfsug-discuss] IO500 SC25 list call for submission

[IO500 Committee]

Call for Submission

Stabilization Period: Sep 29th - Oct 3rd, 2025
Submission Deadline: Nov 3rd, 2025 AoE

The IO500 will soon be accepting and encouraging submissions for the 
upcoming 17th semi-annual IO500 Production and Research lists, in 
conjunction with SC'25. Once again, we will also be accepting 
submissions to the 10 Client Node Challenge to encourage the submission 
of small scale results. View the requirements for submitting to each 
list on the IO500 Submissions Webpage. The new ranked lists will be 
announced at the "IO500: High Performance Storage Community" BoF. We 
hope to see many new results.

The tag io500-sc25 should be used for submissions to this version of the 
benchmark list.
Background

Following the success of the Top500 in collecting and analyzing 
historical trends in supercomputer technology and evolution, the IO500 
was created in 2017, published its first list at SC17, and has grown 
continually since then. The benchmarks represent community accepted 
standards, including being used in Request for Proposals for new HPC 
platforms. The benchmarks showcase the IO access pattern extremes giving 
a full picture of storage system potential performance. The list is 
about much more than just the raw rank; all submissions help the 
community by collecting and publishing a wider corpus of data.

The multi-fold goals of the benchmark suite are as follows:

     Represent naive and optimized access patterns for the execution of 
a rich variety of HPC applications, their achievable performance, and 
the documentation of how the numbers are achieved.
     Support small to extreme-scale Research and Production HPC systems 
using flexible storage APIs
     Maximizing simplicity in running the benchmark suite

Specifically, the benchmark suite includes a hero-run of both IOR and 
mdtest configured however possible to maximize performance and establish 
an upper-bound for performance. It also includes an IOR and mdtest run 
with highly prescribed parameters in an attempt to determine a lower 
performance bound. New in this release is a random 4KB read phase, to 
better understand the performance of non-sequential IO patterns used in 
AI workloads. Finally, it includes a namespace search as this has been 
determined to be a highly sought-after feature in HPC storage systems 
that has historically not been well-measured. Supported storage APIs are 
those that are part of IOR and mdtest. Extending these tools with a 
public pull request can be done to enable new storage APIs.

The goals of the community are also multi-fold:

     Gather historical data for the sake of analysis and to aid 
predictions of storage futures
     Collect tuning information to share valuable performance 
optimizations across the community
     Encourage vendors and designers to optimize for workloads beyond 
"hero runs"
     Establish bounded expectations for users, procurers, and administrators
     Understand and be able to reproduce performance on storage systems

Using the IO500 Reproducibility guidelines, each submission is labeled 
according to the breadth of details provided and the access to the 
deployed storage software that enables the community to reproduce the 
results and study system design changes over time.

The IO500 follows a two-staged approach. First, there will be a two-week 
stabilization period during which we encourage the community to verify 
that the benchmark runs properly on a variety of storage systems. During 
this period the benchmark may be updated based upon feedback from the 
community. The final benchmark will then be released. We expect that 
runs compliant with the rules made during the stabilization period will 
be valid as a final submission unless a significant defect is found.
10 Client Node I/O Challenge

The 10 Client Node Challenge is conducted using the regular IO500 
benchmark, however, with the rule that exactly 10 client nodes must be 
used to run the benchmark. You may use any shared storage with any 
number of servers. We will announce the results in the Production and 
Research lists as well as in separate derived lists.
Birds-of-a-Feather

Once again, we encourage you to submit to join our community, and to 
attend the SC25 BoF where we will announce the new IO500 Production and 
Research lists and their 10 client node counterparts.
Be Part of the Community

Submissions of all sizes are welcome; the webpage has customizable 
sorting, so it is possible to submit on a small system and still get a 
very good per-client score, for example. We will also highlight new and 
interesting results with invited talk(s) at the BoF.