With the increasing adoption of containerization among HPC applications and workflows to achieve the ever-increasing demand in portability, flexibility, and customizability, the IO pattern and workload from such an isolated environment have evolved with a significant amount of complexity. The steadily increasing demand for powerful storage resources has become a problem when running on supercomputers that usually have a shared underlying filesystem. The IO-intensive workload from a single container can lead to performance degradation, or sometimes a complete breakdown, of the whole filesystem. While some IO workload management tools can well address such issues for conventional HPC applications, none of them were designed and tested to accommodate the cases of such isolated environments to the best knowledge of the authors. In this paper, we present a feasibility study using the Optimal Overloaded IO Protection System (OOOPS) tool to reduce the IO impact from containerized environments and discuss the best practice of IO workload management on supercomputers.
