Iometer: Why, What, Where, and How

1
Iometer Why, What, Where, and How?

• Presented By
• Sohail Sarwar
• Supervisor
• Dr. Raihan Ur Rasool

2
Agenda

• Introduction
• What is Iometer
• Where employed
• Why Iometer
• How applied
• Conclusion
• Q A

3
Introduction
4
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.

5
Introduction-II

• SSD performance improvement efforts
• Caching
• 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 performance
• Various Tools available e.g. Winbench, IPeak
• Iometer is the most comprehensive one

6
What is Iometer??
7
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

8
Iometer-II

• Iometer can be used for measurement and
  characterization
• System-level hard drive performance.
• CPU utilizations
• System-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.

9
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.

10
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.

11
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.

12
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.

13
Execution of Iometer

• By executing Iometer.exe.
• Loading a saved setup file by double-clicking on
  an .icf file,
• Dragging an .icf Iometer.exe icon
• C\gt iometer myconfig.icf
• Generates results in .xls

14
How Iometer Applied??
15
To Start Test For Disk Performance

• Initiate Iometer s main window.
• Manager (the name of the local computer) in the
  Topology panel.
• Select managers available disk drives appear in
  the Disk Targets tab.
• Blue icons-physical drives.
• Yellow icons-requires preparation.
• A yellow icon with a red slash.

16
Working Description of components
17
Topology and Disk targets
18
Access Specification
19
Access Specifications- Detailed
20
Test Setup
21
Results display
22
Result Display- Read Detail
23
Result Display- Write Detail
24
Another Result s view
25
Dynamo
26
Process

• Whenever you start a test you will
• Specify the Target disk
• Select an appropriate Access specification
• Press Green flag to start test
• Specify name of CSV file to store results
• Iometer will prepare the device for first time
• By creating test iobw.tst file

27
Other tools

• WinBench 99 (not comprehensive as Iometer)
• Sequential transfer rate, average random acc
• Xbench (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

28
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.

29

• QA

30

• Thanx