Drishti and HDF5: What is actually happening in my application?

The current parallel I/O stack is complex and difficult to tune due to the interdependencies among multiple factors that impact data movement performance between storage and compute systems. When performance is slower than expected, end-users, developers, and system administrators rely on I/O profiling and tracing information to identify the root causes of inefficiencies. However, there is a gap between the currently available metrics, the potential bottlenecks, and the implementation of optimizations that would mitigate performance slowdowns. This talk discusses Drishti: a novel interactive, user-oriented visualization and analysis framework. Drishti seeks to aid users in pinpointing the root causes of I/O performance problems and providing actionable recommendations for improving performance based on the observed characteristics of an application. We cover its usage in applications that rely on HDF5 to store its data by providing some real study cases and discuss how the community can extend Drishti with additional analysis and visualizations.