Earlier this year, Oracle indicated that it would stop commercially supporting Lustre beyond 1.8.3 except when packaged with Oracle hardware. This was not welcome news to the Lustre community, who use the popular open source parallel file system to wrangle ever-increasing volumes of data generated by today’s advanced HPC systems.
In response today, Cray, DDN, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory announced the incorporation of Open Scalable File Systems, Inc.. A California non-profit, OpenSFS describes itself as a technical organization focused on high-end, open-source file system technologies.
OpenSFS presents a unique opportunity for the broader Lustre community to actively contribute to the continued success of the world’s most scalable open-source parallel file system,” said Galen Shipman, group leader of technology integration at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility has consistently achieved leading-edge performance and scalability with the Lustre file system through a highly collaborative development model. We are excited to partner with other leaders in HPC to bring such advancements to the broader community through OpenSFS.”
OpenSFS will collaborate with two centers of excellence already established at ORNL and LLNL, and all interested parties are invited and encouraged to join.
At insideHPC, we’re watching closely to see what happens next in the Lustre community. Another group, HPCFS, has sprung up with similar goals, and you can learn more in my recent interview with Bill Boas. The two groups have very different non-profit status, at least in the eyes of the IRS, and this distinction may be a factor in how this all plays out.
[…] Lustre user communities have since sprung up including HPCFS, OpenSFS, and the European Open Filesystems […]