Explorations of Data Swapping on Burst Buffer

Burst buffers have been widely deployed in many supercomputers to absorb bursty I/O and accelerate I/O performance. Previous work has shown that with burst buffer systems, I/O operations from computer nodes can be greatly accelerated. While the lack of data swapping supports on burst buffer leads to under-utilization and application failure issues. In addition, the effects of data replacement algorithms on application performance and the suitability of each algorithm for the target application are unclear. In this paper, we address these challenges by simulating data swapping on burst buffers with different data replacement strategies. Trace logs from a set of real-world HPC applications are used with different data replacement algorithms to show the behavior of representative HPC applications. From the results, we found that most HPC applications can still achieve full performance when using a buffer size that is far less than the total access space of the application, which can lead to a huge reduction on the required capacity for burst buffer. Moreover, we found that data replacement algorithms can have significant impact on the application performance. Our finding show the importance of having data swapping in reducing the required capacity and guide the future design of the usage of burst buffer.