HEALTH

Cluster File Systems (CFS) this week released the latest update to the open source Lustre file system. Lustre version 1.4.5, available to CFS customers since August 2005, is now available to the general public at no cost. Furthermore, CFS has substantially accelerated its release policy to advance the adoption of Lustre in the free software community. While Lustre has always been available to customers under an open source license, CFS announces that future versions will be released to customers and the general public simultaneously. Community users will no longer need to wait for access to the newest open source Lustre software. "CFS is profitable, we're growing, and we're absolutely committed to open source," wrote Phil Schwan, CEO of Cluster File Systems, in an email to users. "This announcement further demonstrates our desire to provide quality advanced software to the free software community." In addition to another year of maturity, Lustre 1.4.5 delivers many improvements over the previous publicly available version, including: * production-quality clients and servers on Linux 2.6 * support for PowerPC architectures, and mixed-endian clusters * support for Mellanox and Voltaire Infiniband * support for multiple network interfaces in a single node * cluster-wide consistent mmap I/O * support for clusters of more than 5,000 nodes and 400 I/O servers * disk file system improvements for faster, more consistent I/O * SNMP integration The next version of Lustre, to be released in late December, will add: * support for Silverstorm Infiniband and Myrinet (GM) * user and group disk quotas * extended attributes * POSIX access control lists Lustre has been selected by agencies such as the US Departments of Energy and Defense, the National Science Foundation, NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the French Atomic Energy Commission, the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, and the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, in addition to market leaders in life sciences, digital video, oil and gas, internet services, aerospace, manufacturing, and other commercial HPC environments. The Lustre file system is a complete software solution, and users are free to deploy it on the hardware and storage of their choice. Customers have chosen integrated solutions from Bull, Cray, Dell, HP, IBM, Linux Networx, SGI, and Sun Microsystems, using storage from DataDirect Networks, Engenio, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, Sun, and others. CFS provides enterprise-quality support, training, and other professional services to partners and end users.