Colloquium - Braam

The Lustre architecture is a storage architecture including a cluster file system and object oriented storage protocols. Lustre is deployed on many of the worlds largest super computers and has set many records in the areas of I/O and metadata throughput. Lustre uses a novel stackable storage API, carefully crafted to allow features like disconnected operation and high metadata throughput.

In this talk we will begin with an overview of the architecture. We then describe how Lustre attempts to deal with scalability and performance requirements, including a glimpse of the Linux kernel changes the project has had to make and a study of I/O performance in Linux. We finish with an overview of where Lustre is today and what can be expected in the future.

Peter Braam is founder and president of Cluster File Systems, Inc., which has developed the Lustre File System that now powers many of the world's largest super computers and has achieved outstanding bandwidth and scalability goals. Peter is a specialist in distributed file systems, best known for his work on the Lustre project and on the Coda and InterMezzo file systems, which won awards at LinuxWorld and the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in 1999. He received his PhD in 1987 and subsequently held tenured faculty positions at Utah and Oxford where he began to teach Computer Science in 1992. He joined Carnegie Mellon's faculty in 1996 where he led the Coda project for three years. In 1999 he began to commit most of his time to the Linux industry as a part time Cluster and File Systems Architect for Red Hat. Cluster File Systems, Inc. has been profitable and growing for almost five years and has numerous partnerships in the storage industry.

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