And guess what? Lustre is expanding from its traditional base in HPC. With Intel supporting and promoting Lustre, you can expect the performance and scalability of what was once limited to HPC to move into Big Data and Cloud.

Want to hear more? Join us on June 12th in San Francisco. Boyd Davis, Vice President & General Manager of Intel’s Datacenter Software Division, and I will be talking about how Intel is moving Lustre forward. We’ll have existing Lustre partners there and a showcase area. You can even ask your customers or key partners to participate. Come talk Lustre!

To learn more and register today go to: http://lustre.intel.com

Two years ago I wrote a piece in HPCwire called “The State of the Lustre Community.” (August 2011) I had a chance to reread it recently, and as I see the HPDD Lustre team giving presentations and interacting with colleagues at the annual Lustre User Group meeting (LUG 2013) this week, I am struck by what incredible strides Lustre has made in the past two years.

In 2011, the State of the Lustre Community was on the right track, having pulled together organizationally. At LUG 2011, the two US-based Lustre community groups had announced a merger, and at the International Supercomputing (ISC) show in Germany, shortly thereafter, the two existing community groups, OpenSFS and EOFS, signed a memorandum of understanding to show their allegiance.

But there was a perception problem. Lustre was trusted and used only in the capacity of a /tmp directory. This was because Lustre was seen as science project. While Lustre had amazing performance and scalability, it had a reputation that only the best HPC installations in the world were willing to put up with stability issues or unclear release schedules, with their needs, deep knowledge and patience.

That time, and more importantly, that perception, is at least two years behind us. Perceptions – and realities – have changed. Today, Lustre is now often found in the /home directory as a key technology. For 2013, we expect it to be found more and more in enterprise use, as a foundational technology in both HPC and commercial HPC settings.

Getting to this point has been hard work. My company at the time, Whamcloud, did a lot of heavy lifting to lead the technical direction of Lustre. I do not think that is boasting. I think there were legitimate concerns about the future of Lustre in general and very specific issues around its feature set and product roadmap. Whamcloud’s impact on Lustre helped correct these issues.

We especially focused on committing to and following through with a clear release schedule and a very open process that encouraged participation.

Throughout, Whamcloud had a clear goal: To foster an environment where no one entity controlled the technology. We still believe this is key, and is an important ingredient in Lustre’s rapid development. Lustre is open source, and has been paid for by the community.  We feel it should be controlled by the broader community.

So, what is the current state of this community today?

I see a united community, a vibrant vendor environment, an accelerating technology and both a push and a pull into the broader space of Big Data.

First of all, Lustre has an incredibly united community. Born out of necessity two years ago, it has consistently pulled in the same direction. Both the OpenSFS and EOFS have rallied behind one code tree. Open development continues and the OpenSFS working groups are the established clearing houses for the community. This has allowed of very real progress for over two years on the technical front. This is all extremely positive news.

Also very important, vendors have noticed. The quest to expand the vendor community has produced a vibrant Lustre vendor community with multiple product and service offerings that simply did not exist before. The Whamcloud.com website, for example, lists 23 Resellers. This is incredible commercial progress.

And the technology development is accelerating quickly. I mean that in two dimensions! Code contributions have grown from 35k lines of code (LOC) in Lustre 2.1, to 50k in Lustre 2.2, to 85k in Lustre 2.3 and we expect over 200k LOC changes in Lustre 2.4. This is not inefficient, this is not bloat. In fact, it includes both additions and subtractions. What this shows is the growth of a maturing technology, with a wider and wider feature set with uses in more and more markets.

For example, Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM), a data storage technique that facilitates the movement of data between high-cost and low-cost storage media, is coming out soon. A major, long-awaited feature for enterprise customers, HSM will help accelerate Lustre use in the commercial high performance I/O space.

But there’s another way that the technology is accelerating. More groups are now contributing. At the same time as LOC has increased, the core HPDD team contribution has evolved from 90%, to 80% and we expect to be at 75% or less of the code modifications in Lustre 2.4. We think this is a fabulous development because the number of contributors has climbed to 12 or more groups in Lustre 2.4.

This makes Lustre stronger and more in the control of the community.

And when talking about the current state of Lustre in 2013, it is important note the increasing connection to Big Data. If we can find solid ground for the technology in Big Data, we will have broadened our customer base and reduced the load on the HPC community who have been so supportive. To be sure, the relation of Big Data at this stage should not be overstated, but as a key concept in Lustre development, we are Interested in extending Lustre to help expand the market for the vendors who support us today.

Lustre is also strong in future HPC directions now being mapped out now via the Fastforward program. Lustre is an obvious technology choice for the journey to exascale speeds. We are optimistic about the future of Lustre in HPC for the next ten years based on the groundbreaking work going on there.

Go Lustre!

Our founding principles included a deep commitment to the continued development of the Lustre community through an open, multi-vendor tree.  We pledged to treat our customers as we would want to be treated in their position. We also pledged to treat our employees with fairness and respect and to build an exemplary distributed work environment in which an incredibly talented team could thrive.

Upholding these commitments has paid off handsomely for Lustre over the last two years. With the support of a thriving community, Lustre is quickly becoming the preferred solution. And, with the help of OpenSFS and the European Open File System (EOFS), we are continuing our commitment of supporting all vendors with a single tree to drive the growth of the Lustre ecosystem.

We could not be more proud of what we have accomplished and for the culture we have built at Whamcloud. Looking ahead, we see an even greater opportunity to expand Lustre’s success and to push this technology to even higher levels.

With this as our goal, today we have closed a transaction with Intel to acquire Whamcloud. Intel is committed to enabling open, multi-vendor solutions like Lustre and is excited to be working with our team to advance the success of Lustre. Whamcloud’s Lustre expertise complements Intel’s existing capabilities in compute, storage, interconnects, management, and security. In turn, Intel will accelerate Lustre’s leadership in HPC and extend it to the Cloud and Enterprise IT.

We remain firmly committed to our founding principles and to serving the Lustre community. And we feel strongly that, together with Intel, we will enable Lustre to reach for the stars.

Brent Gorda                                       Eric Barton
General Manager                              Lead Architect
High Performance Data Division

We’re sponsoring – enthusiastically – the EOFS / OpenSFS booth at ISC’12. Come by and see how you can participate in the Lustre community. There are multiple Lustre talks, demos, giveaways and more. The big giveaway, by the way, is one free seat at a Whamcloud Lustre Installation and Administration 3- or 4-day training session in the next year. Not too shabby! For all details see: http://www.whamcloud.com/events/isc12/

Eric Barton, Whamcloud CTO, is doing a Keynote Talk called ”Exascale File Systems – Evolution or Revolution?” (Thursday, June 21, 2012 – 10:45am – 11:45am Hall B). I personally will be discussing speeds and feeds in my Exhibitor Forum Talk titled “Positively POSIX: The Race to 1 Terabyte per second” (Tuesday, June 19, 2012 – 12:30pm – 1:00pm at booth #001 in the exhibit hall). We also have a slate of talks in the EOFS booth on Chroma, Lustre releases, and the growing Lustre ecosystem.

If you’re not headed to Hamburg, you can still make your voice heard. The OpenSFS Community Development Working Group is developing long-term support strategy recommendations for Lustre. They’re focused on ensuring future Lustre releases are “well-aligned with the needs of the Lustre community.” Please participate by completing the short survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/FGK8PKK

San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC)

Jumping quickly to some great news back here in California. The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, announced this week that they have completed the deployment of their Lustre-based Data Oasis parallel file system, with 4PB of capacity and 100 GB/s, to handle the data-intensive needs of the center’s new Gordon supercomputer in addition to their Trestles and Triton high-performance computer systems. They’ve measured sustained transfer rates of 100 GB/s, making Data Oasis clearly one the fastest parallel file systems in academia.

Whamcloud provided SDSC with on-site consulting expertise, including hardware, networking, interfaces to various HPC systems, and software installation. We’re helping in the prep and installation of a ZFS-based Lustre file system that combines restructured LNET code with the ZFS code base developed on Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Sequoia system. Whamcloud will share expertise of Lustre SSD projects in order to grow SDSC’s knowledge of how best to deploy SSDs/flash in a Lustre file system. The Gordon supercomputer will, in part, serve as a test bed for the Lustre community.

It’s exciting work and the announcement was a real milestone. As always, results will be provided to the Lustre community.

Hope to see you in Hamburg.

Go Lustre!

Brent

PS. Whamcloud is hiring: http://www.whamcloud.com/company/careers/

Media Links

SDSC press release SDSC Supercharges its ‘Data Oasis’ Storage System http://www.sdsc.edu/News%20Items/PR060412_dataoasis.html

insideHPC Interview: EMC Speeds Lustre Integration with Whamcloud http://insidehpc.com/2012/04/13/interview-emc-speeds-lustre-integration-with-whamcloud/

insideHPC DDN Embraces Chroma Central Management System for Lustre Made Simple http://insidehpc.com/2012/04/17/ddn-embraces-chroma-central-management-system-for-lustre-made-simple/

We kicked LUG off with the DDN – Whamcloud Pre-LUG Party and packed the restaurant. The food was great, the conversations and interactions even better. It really energized me to see that much enthusiasm gathered in one spot.

For LUG itself, the meeting hall was so crowded they had to add tables. The unofficial count says over 220 attendees. That’s a lot of Lustre experts. That compares to about 160 last year. Close to a 40% increase in attendance in one year! Wow.

But more than numbers, I noticed a decided forward momentum at LUG. Last year, there was maybe still some friction as the community groups were just coming together and the vendors were wondering where the technology was headed and how the market would shake out. This year, that’s solidly behind us. Releases are out on schedule, big name vendors are pushing new and interesting Lustre-based products as the Lustre ecosystem gains steam, and even traditionally dour HPC analysts are bullish. You can just feel it.

Just one example, Whamcloud announced that we are extending our working relationship this last month with EMC to provide deeper integration between the Parallel Log-structured File System (PLFS) and Lustre. This will help Lustre improve metadata handling and small file I/O performance. If you’ve been around Lustre for a while, you know this is an exciting development.

If you haven’t taken a look at HPC job boards lately, the number of Lustre positions open is another great indication of the strong interest in the technology. And, yes, Whamcloud is one of the companies hiring: http://www.whamcloud.com/company/careers/

Or, if you want to build your Lustre skills, we’re offering Lustre Installation and Administration training sessions worldwide. Alexandria, VA, at the end of this month, and Barcelona, Spain, in late June. For more information see: http://www.whamcloud.com/lustre/training

And, good news, if you missed LUG, or maybe can’t read your own handwritten notes, the talks are fully recorded and online: http://www.opensfs.org/resources-2/videos

Thanks again to everyone involved with LUG. Like I said… wow!

Go Lustre!

Brent

Media Links

SearchDataCenter.in Object-based File Systems come of age for HPC
http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.in/feature/Object-based-File-Systems-come-of-age-for-HPC

insideHPC Interview: Whamcloud Gears Lustre for the Enterprise to Exascale
http://insidehpc.com/2012/04/05/interview-whamcloud-gears-lustre-for-the-enterprise-to-exascale/

HPCwire in the Cloud Whamcloud, EMC Collaborate on PLFS and Lustre Integration
http://www.hpcinthecloud.com/hpccloud/2012-04-09/whamcloud_emc_collaborate_on_plfs_and_lustre_integration.html

insideHPC Interview: EMC Speeds Lustre Integration with Whamcloud
http://insidehpc.com/2012/04/13/interview-emc-speeds-lustre-integration-with-whamcloud/

HPCwire DDN to Offer Whamcloud Chroma Enterprise with Exascaler
http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2012-04-17/ddn_to_offer_whamcloud_chroma_enterprise_with_exascaler.html

insideHPC DDN Embraces Chroma Central Management System for Lustre Made Simple
http://insidehpc.com/2012/04/17/ddn-embraces-chroma-central-management-system-for-lustre-made-simple/

LUG 2012 is being held in Austin this year, Apr 23-25th, and naturally we’ll be there. Will you? It’s a mainline into all the smart people involved in Lustre. All contributions are welcome. It’s open source at its best.

2012 has been a big year for Lustre already. Lustre 2.2 is out. Three of the fastest new sites coming online this year will use Lustre. And the Lustre ecosystem continues to expand. Here at Whamcloud we’ve continued signing Lustre support and development deals with partners and customers like EMC and Terascala. Big companies like NetApp continue joining OpenSFS, the main Lustre community group in North America, with more on the way.

Just as a testament to Lustre’s serious progress:

“The Spider parallel file systems at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, three of the largest parallel file systems in the world, powered by Data Direct Networks, Dell, Mellanox, and Lustre supported by Whamcloud, have provided unprecedented reliability in supporting the I/O needs of all major compute systems at our Leadership Computing Facility. On our largest file system we have achieved 100% availability in 8 of the 12 months of 2011 with scheduled availability of 99.26% over the entire year. The stability of this system is unprecedented given its scale.”

– Galen M. Shipman, Technology Integration Group Leader, National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at ORNL

We’re giving a preview of the rest of the year in our first Lustre webinar. Next week, Apr 10, 11am PDT, our partner DataDirect Networks and I will be talking about “Lustre’s Secrets.” Questions welcome, so come by and see if I know what I’m talking about. http://www.whamcloud.com/events/lustre-live-webinar/

And we’re kicking off LUG early – Internally I’ve taken to calling it the “Chug a LUG” though I’m not totally sure if I should include that in this newsletter. It gets the idea across quickly, though. We’re co-sponsoring a Pre-LUG party with DDN that first Sunday night, Apr 22nd. We’ll be there to meet old friends and hopefully make some new ones. Please join us. I’ve said this before, but in my experience, the best connections are made outside of the talks.  http://www.whamcloud.com/events/lustre-user-group-2012/

If you miss LUG, we’re offering more and more Lustre Installation and Administration training sessions worldwide. That includes Alexandria, VA, at the end of May, a month after LUG. For more information see:  http://www.whamcloud.com/lustre/training

As mentioned, Lustre 2.2 is out, with improvements to performance, recovery, and stability. Whamcloud is proud to be a big part of the development process and is committed to making sure Lustre continues to come out on time with an extremely high quality, transparent development process. For more information, see: http://www.whamcloud.com/news/lustre-2-2-released/

What about LUG itself? Whamcloud is doing a total of 8 talks. Please come and, most importantly, introduce yourself and ask questions. Interacting with smart people is our favorite part of the job.

http://www.opensfs.org/lug/registration

LUG is now in the second year of being fully run by the community, and it shows. LUG is focused on Lustre technical issues – a real deep dive – and is of the community, for the community, by the community. I’ve been directly involved for many years and am thrilled to see the resurgence in attendance, energy, and, mostly importantly, relevance. If you’re into Lustre, you simply have to be there.

To help get things rolling, DataDirect Networks and Whamcloud are sponsoring a Pre-LUG party right next to the main LUG location that first Sunday night, Apr 22nd. Just like other tech shows, you know some of the best connections are made outside of the talks. It is being held at Zax Restaurant & Bar right next to the Hyatt Regency Austin. We’re closing the restaurant down, it’s just Lustre people from 7pm – 10pm. Please consider this your invitation, and we hope to see you there!

As you might expect, Whamcloud will be doing a ton of presenting at the show. A total of 8 talks by Whamcloud engineers over the 2+ days of activities will keep us busy. That’s the way we like it! Here’s a quick list. If you want more information on any of the topics, please come by and ask questions. Direct interactions are always the best.

Monday, April 23 – LUG Day 1

10:30 – 11:00 Lustre Releases Peter Jones

11:00 – 11:30 Lustre Future Development Andreas Dilger

1:30 – 2:00 Restructuring Project Status Alex Zhuravlev

2:00 – 2:30 Distributed Namespace Phase I Status Wang Di

3:30 – 4:00 Lustre Quality Chris Gearing

Tuesday, April 24 – LUG Day 2

9:00 – 9:30 Leveraging Lustre to Address the I/O Challenges of Exascale Eric Barton

3:10 – 3:30 mds-survey Richard Henwood

Wednesday, April 25 – LUG Day 3

9:40 – 10:00 Lustre Automation Challenges John Spray

The full LUG 2012 agenda is available on OpenSFS.org.

And, on the release side, Lustre 2.1.1 is out. As Peter Jones, Support Manager at Whamcloud, talked about recently, we’ve designated Lustre 2.1.x as our maintenance release stream moving forward. Prominent Lustre sites like LLNL and CEA have both been aggressive in adopting Lustre 2.x releases. More details here.

So, we’re hoping you’ll sign up for LUG and come talk Lustre with us. Maybe we can even make it out to 6th street together and take in some good music. Either way, hope to see you there.

What is the Lustre ecosystem? It’s you. It’s the sites actively deploying Lustre, participating in the community, reporting issues and helping push things forward. It’s the dedicated, engaged developers. It’s the companies implementing Lustre technologies to provide better solutions for customers, extending their Lustre-enabled products into new markets. In short: it’s you!

Whamcloud is here to fully support Lustre users and vendors as you strengthen and extend the Lustre ecosystem. Feel free to contact us directly to learn how you can be involved.

A quick look back

A year ago we were a small group of people intent on preserving Lustre for the community. Early in January we announced our intention to lead the community effort to push Lustre forward and do the 2.1 release. Not only did we get that release out but, as we grew, we also successfully produced the maintenance releases 1.8.6-wc and 1.8.7-wc.It is hard to imagine how 2011 could have gone better for Whamcloud and, frankly, for the community. The year ended with Addison Snell, CEO of Intersect 360 Research, naming the maturation of the Lustre community as the most important HPC trend of 2011 (see the 8-minute mark: http://media2.hpcwire.com/audio/111223_Episode144.mp3).

In short, we grew fast, worked hard and achieved lots. We realize that you, the community, have invested your trust in us as the source of Lustre, and we take that responsibility very seriously.

A quick look forward

2012 looks exciting to us at Whamcloud. We will continue to push forward Lustre development and releases. We will also bring Chroma, our new management suite, to market. This will open new markets for the ecosystem and for our partners.

We believe enabling the Lustre ecosystem in 2012 will further strengthen Lustre, and provide revenue opportunities for all. There are tons of indicators that the Year of the Dragon will be a big year for Lustre. Pete Ungaro, CEO of Cray, named Lustre the winner of SC11 in the official show wrap-up (see the 29-minute mark: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2x9xb4jKaJU). Other major vendors, including DDN, EMC, Fujitsu, NetApp, and more, are enthusiastically supporting the Lustre ecosystem. It’s no longer a risk to build your storage systems around Lustre – the technology is mature, stable and well supported.

2012 will be a big year for Lustre and the whole Lustre ecosystem!

Again, we strongly encourage you to find out how you can contribute. Contact us directly to learn how you can be involved.

Go Lustre!

Brent

Did you attend? Our booth was absolutely overflowing from start to finish. Thank you in particular to everyone who came by and asked great questions – and even helped to answer them, in some cases. I can’t tell you what a fabulous jolt of energy SC11 was for the whole Whamcloud team.

We had quite a few news bits around the show. In particular, the introduction of Chroma^TM – our enterprise storage platform – was very well received. We are bringing Lustre to new markets by enabling our partners to ship Lustre appliances that vastly simplify installation, configuration, maintenance, monitoring, and fault diagnosis. We think this is a major step forward. Chroma facilitates purpose-built appliances, extends the capabilities of the hardware, and reduces the need for rarified Lustre expertise. Chroma was demoed in not only our booth but in the Lustre Pavilion, in the DDN booth, and by the University of Indiana. We were also in the Microsoft booth showing of Lustre pNFS technology.  If you haven’t seen a demo yourself, feel free to contact us.  http://www.whamcloud.com/chroma/

We’ve had a great year and the reception at SC11 was the highlight for us.  Thank you so much for your support and your business. Of course we’ll be at SC12 in Salt Lake City next year in a bigger booth with more cool hats.

With just a quick look back over the past year I can hardly believe how far Lustre has progressed. Whamcloud was founded over a year ago with the goal of restoring confidence in Lustre. We wanted to continue to fully support the Lustre community and its core open source philosophy. We wanted to make sure that Lustre development and support was high quality, highly available, dependable, and always vendor platform neutral. We feel we’ve succeeded. Ask anyone. Lustre is everywhere and is advancing more quickly than ever.

Moving forward, for Lustre to continue to grow, it needs a robust, healthy ecosystem of vendors and users. We’re focused on building this Lustre ecosystem and continuing the vendor-neutral aspect of the technology. Chroma is just one piece in this roadmap. We encourage you to join on us in 2012 to help push Lustre to new heights.

Building a company and supporting a community is not a hobby for us. It’s a passionate endeavor, requiring commitment and, frankly, endless energy. We really mean it when we say thank you for your support.

Season’s greetings to you and yours from the team at Whamcloud. We look forward to seeing you in the new year.

Go Lustre!

Brent

Whamcloud Press Releases

Whamcloud Introduces Chroma, New Complete Storage Solution For Building Lustre Appliances

http://www.whamcloud.com/news/whamcloud-introduces-chroma/

OpenSFS and Whamcloud Sign Lustre Community Tree Development Agreement

http://www.whamcloud.com/news/opensfs-and-whamcloud-sign-lustre-community-tree-development-agreement/

Whamcloud and Fujitsu to Collaborate on Lustre Development

http://www.whamcloud.com/news/whamcloud-and-fujitsu-to-collaborate-on-lustre-development/

Whamcloud and Penguin Computing Sign Lustre Support Agreement

http://www.whamcloud.com/news/whamcloud-and-penguin-computing-sign-lustre-support-agreement/

Media Links

insideHPC  Whamcloud Demos Chroma Management Tool for Lustre at SC11

http://insidehpc.com/2011/11/29/whamcloud-demos-chroma-management-tool-for-lustre-at-sc11/

HPCWire  Lustre Vendors Consider File System’s Future

http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2011-11-22/lustre_vendors_consider_file_system_s_future.html

The Register  NetApp adds Lustre to Big Data line-up

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/15/netapp_lustre_bundles_and_benchmarks/

PCWorld  Fujitsu to Team With Whamcloud in Lustre Development

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/243851/fujitsu_to_team_with_whamcloud_in_lustre_development.html

insideHPC  Video: The New Open Benchmark for Lustre

http://insidehpc.com/2011/11/20/video-the-new-open-benchmark-for-lustre/

HPC Wire video interview, Lustre Community Pavilion @ SC11 with Norman Morse and Hugo Falter

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ibg3KsUR20

HPC Wire video interview, DDN at SC11

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MDm1QjH7_0