Iometer: Why, What, Where, and How?

Presented By Sohail Sarwar

Supervisor Dr. Raihan Ur Rasool

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Agenda

IntroductionWhat is IometerWhere employedWhy IometerHow appliedConclusionQ& A

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Introduction

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Introduction-I

Widening gulf between CPU & SSD speeds.CPU speed 50 % Vs SSD 8 % improvement.High IO intensive Systems.Page miss, IO latencies & wasted CPU cycles.Consequently Information Systems Consume more

energy and Emit masses of CO2.Improving IO performance is imperative.Disparate efforts made to overcome IO problems.

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Introduction-II

SSD performance improvement effortsCaching Prefetching (based on Locality of Reference) Prefetching (based on AI techniques)Solid State Drives

Some mechanism to measure the efficacy of emerging products & techniques

The most common measure is the IO performanceVarious Tools available e.g. Winbench, IPeakIometer is the most comprehensive one

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What is Iometer??

Iometer-I

An open source tools used to emulate the disk or network I/O load of any program or benchmark

Examines and records the performance of I/O operations and their impact on the system

Iometer is an I/O subsystem measurement and typographical tool.

Equips user with Workload generator (to stress the system) Measurement tool (examines and records the IO

performance )

Works for both for single and clustered systems.Usable in Windows as well as Linux environment

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Iometer-II

Iometer can be used for measurement and characterization

System-level hard drive performance.CPU utilizationsSystem-level network performance.Performance of disk and network controllers.Bandwidth and latency capabilities of buses.Network throughput to attached drives.Error in Reading and writing.

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Iometer-III

By Using Iometer ’s GUI, we configure The workload.Set operating parameters.Start and stop tests. Instruct Dynamo what to do?Collects the resulting data.Summarizes the results in output files.Only one copy of Iometer be running at a

time .Typically deployed on the server machine.

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Dynamo-I

Dynamo is the workload generator having no user interface.

At Iometer ’s command, Dynamo performs I/O operations Records performance information,Returns the data to Iometer.

More than one copy of Dynamo can run at a time

One copy runs on each client machine.

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Dynamo-II

Dynamo is multithreaded component. Each copy can simulate the workload of

multiple client programs. Each running copy of Dynamo is called a

‘Manager’. Each thread within a copy of Dynamo is

called a ‘worker’.

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Installing Iometer

Download the Iometer package & uncompress the files

Place the files Iometer.exe and Dynamo.exe in the same directory. (Valid for prior versions)

In order to execute Dynamo on multiple machines, deploy Dynamo.exe on each machine.

If Iometer and Dynamo run on a single system, no network required.

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Execution of Iometer

By executing Iometer.exe.Loading a saved setup file by double-clicking

on an .icf file, Dragging an .icf Iometer.exe iconC:\> iometer myconfig.icfGenerates results in .xls

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How Iometer Applied??

To Start Test For Disk Performance

Initiate Iometer ‘s main window.Manager (the name of the local computer) in

the Topology panel.Select manager’s available disk drives appear

in the Disk Targets tab.Blue icons-physical drives.Yellow icons-requires preparation.A yellow icon with a red slash.

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Working Description of components

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Topology and Disk targets

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Access Specification

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Access Specifications- Detailed

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Test Setup

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Results display

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Result Display- Read Detail

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Result Display- Write Detail

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Another Result ‘s view

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Dynamo

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Process

Whenever you start a test you willSpecify the Target diskSelect an appropriate Access specificationPress ‘Green flag’ to start testSpecify name of CSV file to store results

Iometer will prepare the device for first time

By creating test “iobw.tst” file

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Other tools

WinBench 99 (not comprehensive as Iometer)

Sequential transfer rate, average random accXbench (specific to Mac OS)

Xbench compares the relative speeds of two systems. Access time & CPU utilization.

IOStone (for DOS, UNIX and OS/2 )

read/write troughput in kb/secenchmark

No specific interface & GUI

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Conclusions

The Purpose and working of Iometer has been explained.

How two components of Iometer work.Acquiring the results from .CSV files.Iometer found to be most suitable option

due to GUI, workload generation & display Enhancement in upcoming versions can

be observed on iometer.org.

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Q&A

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Thanx

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