On the Role of Burst Buffers in Leadership-Class Storage Systems Ning Liu,∗y Jason Cope,y Philip Carns,y Christopher Carothers,∗ Robert Ross,y Gary Grider,z Adam Crume,x Carlos Maltzahn,x ∗Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY 12180, USA fliun2,
[email protected] yArgonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL 60439, USA fcopej,carns,
[email protected] zLos Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA
[email protected] xUniversity of California at Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA fadamcrume,
[email protected] Abstract—The largest-scale high-performance (HPC) systems problem for storage system designers. System designers must are stretching parallel file systems to their limits in terms of find a solution that allows applications to minimize time spent aggregate bandwidth and numbers of clients. To further sustain performing I/O (i.e., achieving a high perceived I/O rate) the scalability of these file systems, researchers and HPC storage architects are exploring various storage system designs. One and ensure data durability in the event of failures. However, proposed storage system design integrates a tier of solid-state approaching this in the traditional manner—by providing a burst buffers into the storage system to absorb application I/O high-bandwidth external storage system—will likely result requests. In this paper, we simulate and explore this storage in a storage system that is underutilized much of the time. system design for use by large-scale HPC systems. First, we This underutilization has already been observed on current examine application I/O patterns on an existing large-scale HPC system to identify common burst patterns.