BurstMem: A high-performance burst buffer system for scientific applications

Abstract

The growth of computing power on large-scale systems requires commensurate high-bandwidth I/O systems. Many parallel file systems are designed to provide fast sustainable I/O in response to applications' soaring requirements. To meet this need, a novel system is imperative to temporarily buffer the bursty I/O and gradually flush datasets to long-term parallel file systems. In this paper, we introduce the design of BurstMem, a high-performance burst buffer system. BurstMem provides a storage framework with efficient storage and communication management strategies. Our experiments demonstrate that BurstMem is able to speed up the I/O performance of scientific applications by up to 8.5× on leadership computer systems.