Early Evaluation Of The "Infinite Memory Engine" Burst Buffer Solution

Hierarchical storage architectures are required to meet both, capacity and bandwidth requirements for future high-end storage architectures. In this paper we present the results of an evaluation of an emerging technology, DataDirect Networks' (DDN) Infinite Memory Engine (IME). IME allows to realize a fast buffer in front of a large capacity storage system. We collected benchmarking data with IOR and with the HPC application NEST. The IOR bandwidth results show how well network bandwidth towards such fast buffer can be exploited compared to the external storage system. The NEST benchmarks clearly demonstrate that IME can reduce I/O-induced load imbalance between MPI ranks to a minimum while speeding up I/O as a whole by a considerable factor.