GekkoFS: A temporary distributed file system for HPC applications

We present GekkoFS, a temporary, highly-scalable burst buffer file system which has been specifically optimized for new access patterns of data-intensive High-Performance Computing (HPC) applications. The file system provides relaxed POSIX semantics, only offering features which are actually required by most (not all) applications. It is 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 general-purpose parallel file systems.The work has been funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) through the ADA-FS project as part of the Priority Programme 1648. It is also supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (TIN2015–65316), the Generalitat de Catalunya (2014–SGR–1051), as well as the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (NEXTGenIO, 671951) and the European Comission’s BigStorage project (H2020-MSCA-ITN-2014-642963). This research was conducted using the supercomputer MOGON II and services offered by the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.Peer Reviewe