  Modern parallel filesystems such as Lustre are designed to provide high,
scalable I/O bandwidth in response to growing I/O requirements; however, the
bursty I/O characteristics of many data-intensive scientific applications make
it difficult for back-end parallel filesystems to efficiently handle I/O
requests. A burst buffer system, through which data can be temporarily buffered
via high-performance storage mediums, allows for gradual flushing of data to
back-end filesystems. In this paper, we explore issues surrounding the
development of a burst buffer system for data-intensive scientific
applications. Our initial results demonstrate that utilizing a burst buffer
system on top of the Lustre filesystem shows promise for dealing with the
intense I/O traffic generated by application checkpointing.
