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IBM's High Performance File System

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the but-who-will-use-it dept.

HoosierPeschke writes "BetaNews is running a story about IBM's new file system, General Parallel File System (GPFS). The short and skinny is that the new file system attained a 102 Gigabyte per second transfer rate. The size of the file system is also astonishing at 1.6 petabytes (petabyte == 1,024 terabytes). IBM has up a page with more information and specs on the system.."

6 of 208 comments (clear)

  1. Re: 10 Tbytes? by chris_eineke · · Score: 4, Insightful
    relatively small ( 10Tbytes) file systems
    Seagate recently released a 500GB hard-drive. It costs $431.99CAD. 2 of them makes 1 TB. 2000 makes 1 PB. (Yes, that's overly simplified because it doesn't take into account interconnection cost, cooling, hydro, &c.)

    2000 x 431.99 = $863,980CAD

    I don't think that that's a lot of money for a petabyte raid. Hell, you might even get a 20% discount. Now think back about 20 years. That sum of money could have bought you 1 GB - that is an order of magnitude less in hard drive space. But here is the kicker:
    Approx. 20 years down the road you will get at least two magnitudes more for the same amount of money (wo/ inflation). Why? Because approx. 30 years ago, that sum of money bought you 1 MB of space.

    Ray Kurweil calls it the "Law of Accelerating Returns". 20 years down the road I will call it my petaporn array . Or maybe better not. ;)
    --
    "All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
  2. binary prefixes by Lord+Ender · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The submitter and editors need to learn their numeric prefixes. Come on! This web site is supposed to be for people who understand computer technology!

    A petabyte == 1000 terrabytes
    A pebibyte == 1024 terrabytes

    Please see the NIST definition page:
    http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html

    --
    A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
  3. SCREW THAT!!! ;-) by Ossifer · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Do you even read your own links?

    the exact number in common practice could be either one of the following:
    • 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes -- 1000^5, or 10^15.
    • 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes -- 1024^5, or 2^50.

    Real geeks use powers of two; powers of ten we're only introduced for marketing purposes, which real geeks eschew.
  4. Re:Tech details by Helios1182 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I think your last sentence hit it. There are groups producing huge amounts of data that needs to be stored then processed. What is the point in having 10,000 CPUs crunching numbers only to have the system I/O bound by the hard disk? Memory is still a couple orders of magnitude behind hard drives in size so they have to cache data on the disk at some point.

  5. Re:Google File System by InsaneGeek · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If not... what's the key difference between the two?

    When you care about throughput as well as capacity.

  6. Re:1 petabyte = 1000 terabytes, not 1024. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    No thanks, I hate that SI stuff. Please understand the context, and if it's not "marketing", then use 1024, just like we've always done.