A burst buffer appliance is adapted for coupling between a computer system and a file system. The burst buffer appliance comprises a flash memory or other high-speed memory having a substantially lower access time than the file system, and an analytics engine, and is configured to aggregate multiple data files having a size below a designated threshold into a container having at least one associated metadata file for processing by the analytics engine. The burst buffer appliance directs storage of the container in the file system. The analytics engine is configured to generate at least a content-based portion of the one or more metadata files of the container based at least in part on content of one or more of the multiple data files so as to permit one or more subsequent processing operations to be performed using the metadata file(s) rather than the corresponding multiple data files.