“For those who haven’t been following the details of one of DOE’s more recent procurement rounds, the NERSC-8 and Trinity request for proposals (RFP) explicitly required that all vendor proposals include a burst buffer to address the capability of multi-petaflop simulations to dump tremendous amounts of data in very short order. The target use case is for petascale checkpoint-restart, where the memory of thousands of nodes (hundreds of terabytes of data) needs to be flushed to disk in an amount of time that doesn’t dominate the overall execution time of the calculation.”