IBM General Parallel File System

IBM General Parallel File System

The General Parallel File System (GPFS) is a high-performance shared-disk clustered file system developed by IBM. It is used by many of the world's largest commercial companies, as well as some of the supercomputers on the Top 500 List. For example, GPFS is the filesystem of the ASC Purple Supercomputer which is composed of more than 12,000 processors and has 2 petabytes of total disk storage spanning more than 11,000 disks.

In common with typical cluster filesystems, GPFS provides concurrent high-speed file access to applications executing on multiple nodes of clusters. It can be used with AIX 5L clusters, Linux clusters, on Microsoft Windows Server, or a heterogeneous cluster of AIX, Linux and Windows nodes. In addition to providing filesystem storage capabilities, GPFS provides tools for management and administration of the GPFS cluster and allows for shared access to file systems from remote GPFS clusters.

GPFS has been available on IBM's AIX since 1998, on Linux since 2001 and on Microsoft Windows Server since 2008, and is offered as part of the IBM System Cluster 1350. The most recent release of GPFS 3.5 offers Active File Management to enable asynchronous access and control of local and remote files, thus allowing for global file collaboration.

Read more about IBM General Parallel File System:  History, Architecture, Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) Tools

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