History
The Lustre file system architecture was started as a research project in 1999 by Peter Braam, who was a Senior Systems Scientist at Carnegie Mellon University at the time. Braam went on to found his own company Cluster File Systems and developed Lustre under the ASCI Path Forward project, which released Lustre 1.0 in 2003. In 2007, Sun Microsystems acquired Cluster File Systems Inc. Sun included Lustre with its HPC hardware offerings, with the intent to bring the benefits of Lustre technologies to Sun's ZFS file system and the Solaris operating system. In November 2008, Braam left Sun Microsystems to work on another filesystem, leaving Eric Barton and Andreas Dilger in charge of Lustre architecture and development.
In 2010 Oracle Corporation, by way of its 2010 acquisition of Sun, began to manage and release Lustre.
In April 2010 Oracle announced it would limit paid support for new Lustre 2.0 deployment to Oracle hardware, or hardware provided by approved third party vendors. Lustre remained available under the GPL license to all users, and existing Lustre 1.8 customers would continue to receive support from Oracle.
In December 2010, Oracle announced they would cease Lustre 2.x development and place Lustre 1.8 into maintenance-only support creating uncertainty around the future development of the file system. Following this announcement, several new organizations sprung up to provide support and development in an open community development model, including Whamcloud, Xyratex, Open Scalable File Systems (OpenSFS), EUROPEAN Open File Systems (EOFS) and others. In the same year, Eric Barton and Andreas Dilger left Oracle for the Lustre-centric startup Whamcloud, where they continue to work on Lustre.
In 2011, OpenSFS awarded a substantial contract for Lustre feature development to Whamcloud. This contract covers the completion of several long-standing features, including improved Single Server Metadata Performance scaling, which allows Lustre to better take advantage of many-core metadata server; online Lustre distributed filesystem checking (LFSCK), which allows verification of the distributed filesystem state between data and metadata servers while the filesystem is mounted and in use; and Distributed Namespace, formerly Clustered Metadata (CMD), which allows the Lustre metadata to be distributed across multiple servers. Development also continued on ZFS-based back-end object storage at LLNL. These features form the backbone of upcoming Lustre 2.2 to 2.4 community release roadmap. In late 2011, a separate contract was awarded to Whamcloud for the maintenance of the Lustre 2.x source code to ensure that the Lustre code would receive sufficient testing and bug fixing while new features were being developed.
In July 2012 Whamcloud was acquired by Intel in order to bolster its supercomputing infrastructure capabilities and ramp up for exascale storage development after Whamcloud won the FastForward DOE contract to extend Lustre for exascale computing systems in the 2018 timeframe.
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