To share or not to share: comparing burst buffer architectures

Modern high performance computing platforms employ burst buffers to overcome the I/O bottleneck that limits the scale and efficiency of large-scale parallel computations. Currently there are two competing burst buffer architectures. One is to treat burst buffers as a dedicated shared resource, The other is to integrate burst buffer hardware into each compute node. In this paper we examine the design tradeoffs associated with local and shared, dedicated burst buffer architectures through modeling. By seeding our simulation with realistic workloads, we are able to systematically evaluate the resulting performance of both designs. Our studies validate previous results indicating that storage systems without parity protection can reduce overall time to solution, and further determine that shared burst buffer organizations can result in a 3.5× greater average application I/O throughput compared to local burst buffer configurations.