CCR researcher Jay Lofstead, together with collaborators John Bent from Seagate, Julian Kunkel from the German Climate Computing Center, and Georges Markomanolis of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology released the first results of the IO-500 benchmark during a birds-of-a-feather (BOF) gathering at the recent Supercomputing conference. Similar to the popular Top 500 list that ranks the fastest supercomputers in the world twice a year, the IO-500 list is a composite benchmark that measures the performance and scalability of storage systems intended to serve large-scale parallel computing platforms and applications. Unlike other benchmarks and the resulting rankings, IO-500 uses the composite ranking to motivate both documenting storage systems over time as well as collecting best practices for achieving high performance by encouraging ‘gaming’ easy tests while revealing what is done. More details on the motivation for the benchmark, the results, and the Virtual Institute for I/O (VI4IO) can be found in this article by The Next Platform.