io_thrash is intended to be used to assess IO subsystem performance by simulating the database and journal file IO activity of FIS GT.M™, a highly scalable schema-less database engine with support for full ACID (Atomic, Consistent, Isolated, Durable) transactions.  In addition to its use in financial services as an engine for FIS Profile®, GT.M is also widely used in health care.

io_thrash is written in ANSI C and should build and run on any POSIX system against any POSIX file system.  As such, it can be used to simulate workloads for apples-to-apples comparisons of different file systems (e.g., ext3 vs. jfs), different IO subsystems (e.g., SCSI vs. SAN), different computer systems (e.g., IBM pSeries AIX vs. Sun SPARC Solaris), etc.

The software is FOSS licensed under the terms of the Affero GPL v3.  The use documentation is licensed under the terms of the GNU FDL v1.3.  io_thrash can be downloaded from Source Forge.

Note: io_thrash neither is nor is it meant to be production grade software.  It is a tool for developers, performance technicians, and others for rough-and-ready assessments and comparisons of platforms.  It is being released as-is and unsupported in the hope that it will be useful.