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IBM's High Performance File System
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.."
I thought this article was going to be about IBM's HPFS from OS/2.
It's basically data striping across 1000 disks. I suppose the hard part is coordinating all of that parallelism.
So, could someone who actually knows this stuff tell me how well I did?
GPFS Whitepaper - http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/pseries/soft ware/whitepapers/gpfsprimer.pdf
"GPFS is a cluster file system providing normal application interfaces, and has been available on AIX® operating system-based clusters since 1998 and Linux operating system-based clusters since 2001. GPFS distinguishes itself from other cluster file systems by providing concurrent, high-speed file access to applications executing on multiple nodes in an AIX 5L cluster, a Linux cluster or a heterogeneous cluster of AIX 5L and Linux machines. The processors supporting this cluster may be a mixture of IBM System p5(TM), p5 and pSeries® machines, IBM BladeCenter(TM) or IBM xSeries® machines based on Intel® or AMD processors. GPFS supports the current releases of AIX 5L and selected releases of Red Hat and SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server distributions. See the GPFS FAQ1 for a current list of tested machines and also tested Linux distribution levels. It is possible to run GPFS on compatible machines from other hardware vendors, but you should contact your IBM sales representative for details.
GPFS for AIX 5L and GPFS for Linux are derived from the same programming source and differ principally in adapting to the different hardware and operating system environments. The functionality of the two products is identical. GPFS V2.3 allows AIX 5L and Linux nodes, including Linux nodes on different machine architectures, to exist in the same cluster with shared access to the same GPFS file system. A cluster is a managed collection of computers which are connected via a network and share access to storage. Storage may be shared directly using storage networking capabilities provided by a storage vendor or by using IBM supplied capabilities which simulate a storage area network (SAN) over an IP network.
GPFS V2.3 is enhanced over previous releases of GPFS by introducing the capability to share data between clusters. This means that a cluster with proper authority can mount and directly access data owned by another cluster. It is possible to create clusters which own no data and are created for the sole purpose of accessing data owned by other clusters. The data transport uses either GPFS SAN simulation capabilities over a general network or SAN extension hardware.
GPFS V2.3 also adds new facilities in support of disaster recovery, recoverability and scaling. See the product publications for details2."
You puny geekling. It's been years since I migrated my enormous collection of pr0n to my petabyte array...
Running out of space too... maybe I should build a beowulf cluster of them.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
Oh, come now. They just finished winning their latest legal round on FAT
Give them a moment to catch their breath, will you?
introducing OrigamiFS, you write it out on paper then fold it in half as many times as you can
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I think the "news" is the transfer rate, not the file system.
According to this article, the idea was just to see how fast a sustained transfer rate they could achieve. That rate was 102 GiB/s, which apparently is a record. The purpose of the project apparently has something to do with reducing the bottlenecking in parallel-computing interconnects. The machine they used, ASC Purple (a weapons-research system at Lawrence Livermore Labs) has about 10,000+ processors, so that's their obvious application.
The filesystem itself doesn't seem to be anything new -- I have no idea why the poster fixated on that, since it's kind of a minor footnote in most of the articles I've read about this today.
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