Accelerating big data analytics on HPC clusters using two-level storage

Data-intensive applications that are inherently I/O bound have become a major workload on traditional high-performance computing (HPC) clusters. Simply employing data-intensive computing storage such as HDFS or using parallel file systems available on HPC clusters to serve such applications incurs performance and scalability issues. In this paper, we present a novel two-level storage system that integrates an upper-level in-memory file system with a lower-level parallel file system. The former renders memory-speed high I/O performance and the latter renders consistent storage with large capacity. We build a two-level storage system prototype with Tachyon and OrangeFS, and analyze the resulting I/O throughput for typical MapReduce operations. Theoretical modeling and experiments show that the proposed two-level storage delivers higher aggregate I/O throughput than HDFS and OrangeFS and achieves scalable performance for both read and write. We expect this two-level storage approach to provide insights on system design for big data analytics on HPC clusters.