Understanding Burst Buffer Technology and Its Role in High‑Performance Computing (HPC)

Burst Buffer is a storage acceleration technology that improves I/O performance in high‑performance computing (HPC) environments; the article references a previous detailed analysis of DDN IME technology.

Using Burst Buffer can improve two I/O scenarios: it increases the total bandwidth available to applications and raises the file system's operations per second (OPS), which is often a performance bottleneck in HPC workloads.

At the application level, Burst Buffer enhances reliability through faster checkpoint/restart, speeds up small‑block I/O and analysis, provides rapid temporary storage for core‑external applications, and creates staging areas for persistent high‑speed storage needs.

For bursty compute workloads, Burst Buffer balances storage cost and performance by using fewer SSDs to deliver peak performance while relying on the parallel file system during low‑load periods; the growing use of SSD‑based NAS in HPC indicates a broad future for high‑capacity, high‑performance NAS applications.

DDN has performed an in‑depth analysis of the IME‑based Burst Buffer architecture and operation, and the article shares links to technical documents from DDN, EMC, Cray, and IBM for HPC storage designers.

Besides DataDirect Networks, Cray, IBM, and EMC are also researching Burst Buffer technology.

Cray’s DataWarp solution uses XC40 and CS400 supercomputers with Intel CPUs, NVIDIA Tesla GPUs, and the Aries ASIC network; it employs PCIe Gen3 and connects compute and I/O nodes via the Aries interconnect.

EMC’s Burst Buffer solution, the Active Burst Buffer Appliance (aBBa), supports many parallel file systems (Lustre, Isilon, PanFS, HDFS, VNX) and can improve overall compute performance by about 30%.

IBM’s GPFS provides Burst Buffer capability by asynchronously caching data between SSDs and GPFS, implementing local checkpoint mechanisms and data buffering.

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