Brent Gorda, GM, Intel High Performance Data Division
This letter to the Lustre Community was submitted by Brent Gorda, GM, Intel High Performance Data Division.
Another year has passed and, with it, more growth for Lustre and the community around it. This year, as well as welcoming many new HPC sites to the community, we also delight in the evidence of activity from non-traditional Lustre sites and users. In addition, we are excited by OpenSFS’s plan to organize the community and take on a larger share of the work that the team at Intel has been shouldering for several years.
At Intel, we’ve continued to see strong growth in the use of Lustre and movement to newer versions. We eagerly await the results of the recent community survey, but we can already say that a majority of sites we work with have moved forward to a 2.5.x code base. This is a strong endorsement of the advances made over the past several years to add features and stability to the code. We appreciate the vote of confidence in our work and we are excited to learn of the multitude of configurations, applications and storage platforms used in the community. Remember, Intel supports you on the hardware you choose to buy – separation of your storage hardware from the choice of software is a strength of open source and the team at Intel is here to help you succeed.
In 2014, we saw more signs of encouragement in Lustre’s ability to provide value for enterprise environments. PayPal, an eBay company, was very public about their use of Lustre – which they use to help support real-time fraud detection. The commercial community is not always open about the technologies they use, so it is particularly impactful to hear the PayPal story. From our experience, this is the tip of the iceberg and definitely a sign of things to come for the Lustre community.
Many of you are aware of the work Intel does for the community. The team has led every community release of Lustre – starting while at Whamcloud. OpenSFS recognized the importance of this work and has provided financial backing to offset some of the costs. Intel has been the leading group standing up to help the community get organized – through effort on software, releases, community activities and dollars. This was done to give the community time to get organized, have legs under it and be able to take on the work itself. The goal is to have a vibrant open source project led by the community and not held by one company.
In fact, Intel has a strong history of contributing to open source projects. There are thousands of open source programmers here at Intel and the company is one of the largest contributors to Linux. We understand open source and are strong advocates for community run projects, which is why we are happy to see OpenSFS step up and take the lead on releases for the community. As of this writing, Lustre v2.7 has just been announced and we are working to support OpenSFS as they take point on defining what releases are and when they will be available. We will be there helping, supporting, cheering and contributing – but as a supporter, not as the lead. This new model can use your help: Please get involved in OpenSFS if you have an ability to contribute – code, money, testing, debugging, and even requesting & debating features that you want to see developed. This is your community – get involved at www.OpenSFS.org.
For Intel customers, rest assured that the team here is working to make Intel products for Lustre better every day. We have the team for this and we are aggressively growing. If you know someone who wants to work at a great company, please reach out or visit jobs.intel.com.
We are hiring:
– interns, contractors, full time employees
– search for “lustre” on http://jobs.intel.com
The annual Lustre User Group meeting is in Denver April 13-15. I hope to see you there.
Go Lustre!
