PVFS2 - a High-Performance Parallel File System

Posted by timothy on Tuesday November 9, 2004 @01:49PM from the good-nodes-are-still-available dept.

neillm78 writes "As part of the development team, we're announcing PVFS2 version 1.0 here in Pittsburgh at the SC2004 conference! PVFS2 is a GPL/LGPL based parallel file system for cluster-based applications. It logically groups any number of storage servers into a coherent file system for use by client nodes, specifically tailored to handle efficient access to large shared files. PVFS2 supports access via an MPI-IO interface for high-performance parallel applications, but you can still mount it like a regular GNU/Linux file system for traditional serial applications and managment. The PVFS2 project is conducted jointly between The Parallel Architecture Research Laboratory at Clemson University and The Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory. Please feel free to give it a try!"

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Re:Been following it for a while... by brsmith4 · 2004-11-09 15:56 · Score: 4, Informative

It's a parallel file system, not a drop in replacement for local FS's like XFS or ext3. It runs across multiple hosts, striping the data on each host. Also, haveing multiple I/O hosts in the array helps to distribute the read/write across multiple nodes, thus reducing the overhead for those operations.

This is like "Distributed NFS" although that description does it a huge injustice, it should help to get the point across.