National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center

54 NERSC ANNUAL REPORT 2015
• Ability for application to benefit significantly from the burst buffer
• Resources available from the application team to match NERSC/vendor resources
NERSC originally intended to select five teams to partner with on early burst buffer use cases.
However, because of the large response, NERSC chose to support 13 application teams, meaning
that each application team would have a point of contact for support from NERSC’s staff. In
addition, NERSC chose to give an additional 16 teams early access to the burst buffer hardware, but
without dedicated support from a NERSC staff member.
Initially, the burst buffer was conceived for the checkpoint and restart use case; however, with
NERSC’s broad workload, the use cases turned out to be much more diverse, ranging from coupling
together complex workflows and staging intermediate files to database applications requiring a large
number of I/O operations. Ongoing bi-weekly meetings are held to update users on the latest burst
buffer software patches, to offer example use cases and best practices and to allow users to share
their experiences.
The Burst Buffer Early User Program Early Access Projects
PROJECT DOE OFFICE BB DATA FEATURES
Nyx/Boxlib cosmology simulations HEP I/O bandwidth with BB; checkpointing; workflow
(Ann Almgren, LBNL)
application coupling; in situ analysis
Phoenix: 3D atmosphere simulator for
supernovae (Eddie Baron, U. Oklahoma)
Chombo-Crunch + VisIt for carbon
sequestration (David Trebotich, LBNL)
Sigma/UniFam/Sipros Bioinformatics
codes (Chongle Pan, ORNL)
XGC1 for plasma simulation
(Scott Klasky, ORNL)
HEP
BES
BER
FES
I/O bandwidth with BB; staging intermediate files;
workflow application coupling; checkpointing
I/O bandwidth with BB; in situ analysis/visualization using
BB; workflow application coupling
Staging intermediate files; high IOPs; checkpointing;
fast reads
I/O bandwidth with BB; intermediate file I/O;
checkpointing
PSANA for LCLS (Amadeo Perazzo, SLAC) BES/BER Staging data with BB; workflow management;
in-transit analysis
ALICE data analysis (Jeff Porter, LBNL) NP I/O bandwidth with BB; read-intensive I/O
Tractor: cosmological data analysis (DESI) HEP Intermediate file I/O using BB; high IOPs
(Peter Nugent, LBNL)
VPIC-IO performance (Suren Byna, LBNL) HEP/ACSR I/O bandwidth with BB; in situ data analysis; BB to
stage data
YODA: Geant4 sims for ATLAS detector HEP BB for high IOPs; stage small intermediate files
(Vakhtang Tsulaia, LBNL)
ALS SPOT Suite (Craig Tull, LBNL) BES/BER BB as fast cache; workflow management; visualization
TomoPy for ALS image reconstruction
(Craig Tull, LBNL)
kitware: VPIC/Catalyst/ParaView
(Berk Geveci, kitware)
BES/BER
ASCR
I/O throughput with BB; workflow management;
read-intensive I/O
in situ analysis/visualization with BB; multi-stage
workflow