174 High Performance Parallel I/O
applications. Additionally, the PLFS shared file mode has been used in two
use-cases not originally envisioned when PLFS was first developed: for burst
buffers and for enabling parallel I/O to file systems which do not natively
support parallel I/O.
14.3.1 Burst Buffers
As HPC transitions from petascale to exascale, the economics of storage
media dictate a new storage architecture. HPC users have two basic check-
pointing requirements from their storage systems: they require a minimum
bandwidth for checkpointing to enable a sufficient utilization of the super-
computer and they require a minimum capacity to store a sufficient amount
of checkpoint data. In the petascale, disk-based storage systems provisioned
for the capacity