LUSTRE FILE SYSTEM

Lustre is a storage architecture for clusters. The central component is the Lustre file system, a shared file system for clusters. The Lustre file system is currently available for Linux and provides a POSIX-compliant UNIX® file system interface.

The Lustre architecture is used for many different kinds of clusters. It is best known for powering seven of the ten largest high-performance computing (HPC) clusters in the world, with tens of thousands of client systems, petabytes (PB) of storage and hundreds of gigabytes per second (GB/sec) of I/O throughput. Many HPC sites use Lustre as a site-wide global file system, servicing dozens of clusters on an unprecedented scale. IDC lists Lustre as the file system with the largest market share in HPC. (Source: IDC’s HPC User Forum Survey, 2007 HPC Storage and Data Management: User/Vendor Perspectives and Survey Results)

The scalability offered by Lustre deployments has made them popular in the oil and gas, manufacturing, rich media, and finance sectors. Most interestingly, a Lustre file system is used as a general-purpose, datacenter back-end file system at a variety of sites, from Internet service providers (ISPs) to large financial institutions. With upcoming enhancements to wide-area support in Lustre networking (LNET) and storage software, the deployments in these market segments should become even more important.

The scalability of a Lustre file system reduces the need to deploy many separate file systems, such as one for each cluster or, even worse, one for each NFS file server. This leads to profound storage management advantages, for example, avoiding the maintenance of multiple copies of data staged on multiple file systems. Indeed, major HPC datacenters claim that for this reason they require much less aggregate storage with a Lustre file system than with other solutions. Hand in hand with aggregating file system capacity with many servers, I/O throughput is also aggregated and scales with additional servers. Moreover, throughput or capacity can be easily adjusted after the cluster is installed by adding servers dynamically.

Because Lustre software is open source software, it has been adopted by a number of other computing companies and integrated with their offerings. Both Red Hat and Novell (SUSE) offer kernels with Lustre patches for easy deployment. Some 10,000 downloads of Lustre software occur every month. Hundreds of clusters are supported Lustre software, with probably many more unsupported installations.

The Lustre architecture was first developed at Carnegie Mellon University as a research project in 1999. In 2003, Lustre 1.0 was released and was immediately used on many large production clusters with groundbreaking I/O performance. This performance was due in large part to enhancements to the Linux ext3 file system with high-performance enterprise features.

Sample solution RAID, Inc. provided for a major government lab