Marc Hamilton’s Top 10 HPC Events That Mattered In 2012

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

HP’s Marc Hamilton is out with his list of Top Ten Events in HPC for 2012. And while he rates the launches of Intel Xeon Phi and Nvidia Kepler as #1 and #2, the revival of Lustre at #6 looks to me to be the one that will have the most lasting impact.

The 2010 Lustre User Group was held in a beautiful setting at the Seascape Resort in Monterey Bay, California but most attendees left talking not about the resort but about the changes unfolding with Lustre’s new owner. As Oracle mostly abandoned Lustre, many long-time users wondered what would happen to the open source parallel file system originally developed by Peter Braam and team at Cluster File Systems which was later acquired by Sun Microsystems and ultimately Oracle. Oracle’s disinterest in Lustre proved to be one of the best things that ever happened to it. From new companies like Whamcloud formed to offer commercial support (Intel acquired Whamcloud and formed their new High Performance Data Division in 2012) to established storage companies like Xyratex introducing new products like Clusterstor based on Lustre, the Lustre ecosystem is more dynamic and vibrant than ever. Because of its mix of use in commercial storage solutions from Xyratex, DDN, and others to its broad open source base across untold number of storage platforms, it is hard to get good statistics on Lustre use but it is hard to believe that the numbers won’t go anywhere but up in 2013, especially with its new backing from Intel’s High Performance Data Division.

Read the Full Story.