Node-local burst buffers are becoming an indispensable hardware resource on large-scale supercomputers to buffer the bursty I/O from scientific applications. However, there is a lack of software support for burst buffers to be efficiently shared by applications within a batch-submitted job and recycled across different batch jobs. In addition, burst buffers need to cope with a variety of challenging I/O patterns from data-intensive scientific applications.
UnifyFS is a user-level burst buffer file system under active development. UnifyFS supports scalable and efficient aggregation of I/O bandwidth from burst buffers while having the same life cycle as a batch-submitted job. While UnifyFS is designed for N-N write/read, UnifyFS compliments its functionality with the support for N-1 write/read. It efficiently accelerates scientific I/O based on scalable metadata indexing, co-located I/O delegation, and server-side read clustering and pipelining.
Full UnifyFS documentation is contained here.
Use Build & I/O Interception for instructions on how to build and install UnifyFS.
The current status of the UnifyFS dev branch is:
Contributing guidelines can be found in our documentation.