Abstract
Today’s High-Performance Computing (HPC) environments increasingly have to manage relatively new access patterns (e.g., large numbers of metadata operations) which general-purpose parallel file systems (PFS) were not optimized for. Burst-buffer file systems aim to solve that challenge by spanning an ad hoc file system across node-local flash storage at compute nodes to relief the PFS from such access patterns. However, existing burst-buffer file systems still support many of the traditional file system features, which are often not required in HPC applications, at the cost of file system performance.
Highlights
Application-imposed workloads on High-Performance computing (HPC) environments have considerably changed in the past decade
We evaluate the performance of GekkoFS based on various unmodified microbenchmarks which catch access patterns that are common in HPC applications
GekkoFS and Lustre have different goals, we point out the performances that can be gained by using GekkoFS as a burst buffer file system
Summary
Application-imposed workloads on High-Performance computing (HPC) environments have considerably changed in the past decade. Large numbers of metadata operations, data synchronization, non-contiguous and random access patterns, and small I/O requests [14, 45], used in data-driven science applications, are challenging for today’s general-parallel file systems (PFSs) to handle since past workloads mostly perform sequential I/O operations on large files. Are such applications disruptive to the shared storage system and heavily interfere with other applications which access the same shared storage system [18, 68]. Many workloads which impose these new types of I/O operations suffer from prolonged I/O latencies, reduced file system performance, and occasional long wait times
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