Publications

Measuring the impact of burst buffers on data-intensive scientific workflows

Abstract

Science applications frequently produce and consume large volumes of data, but delivering this data to and from compute resources can be challenging, as parallel file system performance is not keeping up with compute and memory performance. To mitigate this I/O bottleneck, some systems have deployed burst buffers, but their impact on performance for real-world scientific workflow applications is still not clear. In this paper, we examine the impact of burst buffers through the remote-shared, allocatable burst buffers on the Cori system at NERSC. By running two data-intensive workflows, a high-throughput genome analysis workflow, and a subset of the SCEC high-performance CyberShake workflow, a production seismic hazard analysis workflow, we find that using burst buffers offers read and write improvements of an order of magnitude, and these improvements lead to increased job performance, and thereby …

Date
2019
Authors
Rafael Ferreira da Silva, Scott Callaghan, Tu Mai Anh Do, George Papadimitriou, Ewa Deelman
Journal
Future Generation Computer Systems
Volume
101
Pages
208-220
Publisher
North-Holland