  High performance computing (HPC) applications have a high requirement on
storage speed and capacity. Non-volatile memory is a promising technology to
replace traditional storage devices to improve HPC performance. Earlier in
2017, Intel and Micron released first NVM product -- Intel Optane SSDs. Optane
is much faster and more durable than the traditional storage device. It creates
a bridge to narrow the performance gap between DRAM and storage. But is the
existing HPC I/O stack still suitable for new NVM devices like Intel Optane?
How does HPC I/O workload perform with Intel Optane?
  In this paper, we analyze the performance of I/O intensive HPC applications
with Optane as a block device and try to answer the above questions. We study
the performance from three perspectives: (1) basic read and write bandwidth of
Optane, (2) a performance comparison study between Optane and HDD, including
checkpoint workload, MPI individual I/O vs. POSIX I/O, and MPI individual I/O
vs. MPI collective I/O, and (3) the impact of Optane on the performance of a
parallel file system, PVFS2.
