What Size Should Your Buffers to Disks be?

Burst-Buffers are high throughput, small size intermediate storage systems typically based on SSDs or NVRAM that are designed to be used as a potential buffer between the computing nodes of a supercomputer and its main storage system consisting of hard drives. Their purpose is to absorb the bursts of I/O that many HPC applications experience (for example for saving checkpoints or data from intermediate results). In this paper, we propose a probabilistic model for evaluating the performance of Burst-Buffers. From a model of application and a data management strategy, we build a Markov-chain-based model of the system, that allows us to quickly answer issues about dimensioning of the system: for a given set of applications, and for a given Burst-Buffer size and bandwidth, how often does the buffer overflow? We also provide extensive simulation results to validate our modeling approach.