Development of a Burst Buffer System for Data-Intensive Applications

Modern parallel filesystems such as Lustre are designed to provide high, scalable I/O bandwidth in response to growing I/O requirements; however, the bursty I/O characteristics of many data-intensive scientific applications make it difficult for back-end parallel filesystems to efficiently handle I/O requests. A burst buffer system, through which data can be temporarily buffered via high-performance storage mediums, allows for gradual flushing of data to back-end filesystems. In this paper, we explore issues surrounding the development of a burst buffer system for data-intensive scientific applications. Our initial results demonstrate that utilizing a burst buffer system on top of the Lustre filesystem shows promise for dealing with the intense I/O traffic generated by application checkpointing.