Paper Info
Title
Integration of Burst Buffer in High-level Parallel I/O Library for Exa-scale Computing Era.
Abstract
While the computing power of supercomputers continues to improve at an astonishing rate, companion I/O systems are struggling to keep up in performance. To mitigate the performance gap, several supercomputing systems have been configured to incorporate burst buffers into their I/O stack; the exact role of which, however, still remains unclear. In this paper, we examine the features of burst buffers and study their impact on application I/O performance. Our goal is to demonstrate that burst buffers can be utilized by parallel I/O libraries to significantly improve performance. To this end, we developed an I/O driver in PnetCDF that uses a log-based format to store individual I/O requests on the burst buffer – later to be flushed to the parallel file system as one request. We evaluated our implementation by running standard I/O benchmarks on Cori, a Cray XC40 supercomputer at NERSC with a centralized burst buffer system, and Theta, a Cray XC40 supercomputer at ALCF with locally available SSDs. Our results show that IO aggregation is a promising role for burst buffers in high-level I/O libraries.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1109/PDSW-DISCS.2018.000-1
PDSW-DISCS@SC
Keywords
Field
DocType
Libraries,Buffer storage,File systems,Servers,Supercomputers,Metadata,Hard disks
Metadata,File system,Supercomputer,Computer science,Server,Burst buffer,Parallel I/O,Operating system,Performance gap
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-7281-0192-7
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Kaiyuan Hou101.01
Reda Al-Bahrani2174.70
Esteban Rangel362.40
Ankit Agrawal460759.22
Robert Latham536526.39
Rob Ross6184.81
Alok N. Choudhary73441326.32
Wei-keng Liao8109587.98