Many scientific fields increasingly use high-performance computing (HPC) to process and analyze massive amounts of experimental data while storage systems in today’s HPC environments have to cope with new access patterns. These patterns include many metadata operations, small I/O requests, or randomized file I/O, while general-purpose parallel file systems have been optimized for sequential shared access to large files. Burst buffer file systems create a separate file system that applications can use to store temporary data. They aggregate node-local storage available within the compute nodes or use dedicated SSD clusters and offer a peak bandwidth higher than that of the backend parallel file system without interfering with it. However, burst buffer file systems typically offer many features that a scientific application, running in isolation for a limited amount of time, does not require. We present GekkoFS, a temporary, highly-scalable file system which has been specifically optimized for the aforementioned use cases. GekkoFS provides relaxed POSIX semantics which only offers features which are actually required by most (not all) applications. GekkoFS is, therefore, able to provide scalable I/O performance and reaches millions of metadata operations already for a small number of nodes, significantly outperforming the capabilities of common parallel file systems.

中文翻译：

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GekkoFS — 用于 HPC 应用程序的临时突发缓冲区文件系统

许多科学领域越来越多地使用高性能计算 (HPC) 来处理和分析大量实验数据，而当今 HPC 环境中的存储系统必须应对新的访问模式。这些模式包括许多元数据操作、小 I/O 请求或随机文件 I/O，而通用并行文件系统已针对大文件的顺序共享访问进行了优化。突发缓冲文件系统创建了一个单独的文件系统，应用程序可以使用它来存储临时数据。它们聚合计算节点内可用的节点本地存储或使用专用 SSD 集群，并提供比后端并行文件系统更高的峰值带宽，而不会干扰它。然而，突发缓冲文件系统通常提供科学应用程序、隔离运行有限的时间，不需要。我们展示了 GekkoFS，这是一个临时的、高度可扩展的文件系统，专门针对上述用例进行了优化。GekkoFS 提供宽松的 POSIX 语义，该语义仅提供大多数（并非所有）应用程序实际需要的功能。因此，GekkoFS 能够提供可扩展的 I/O 性能，并且已经为少量节点实现了数百万次元数据操作，显着优于常见并行文件系统的功能。