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. GekkoFS is a temporary, highly-scalable burst buffer file system that pools node-local storage, available within compute nodes, and has been optimized to the aforementioned use cases. The file system provides relaxed POSIX semantics, which only offers features that are actually required by most (not all) applications. GekkoFS provides scalable I/O performance and reaches millions of metadata operations already for a small number of nodes, significantly outperforming the capabilities of conventional parallel file systems. In this talk, we will present GekkoFS’ motivation and fundamental design considerations that result in its almost linear scalability. Further, we will discuss its performance and future goals.
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