Thursday, 13 September 2007

Sun To Acquire Cluster File Systems

Sun Microsystems has said it will acquire some properties of software provider Cluster File Systems.

With this deal, Sun gets access to Cluster’s open source Lustre File System, commonly used in big cluster computing.

The Lustre File System is used to power clusters with tens of thousands of nodes and petabytes of data, allowing for massive parallel I/O and metadata throughput.

By acquiring Cluster File Systems, Sun intends to add support for the Solaris Operating System on Lustre and plans to continue enhancing Lustre on Linux and Solaris OS across multi vendor hardware platforms.

As previously announced in July 2007, Sun also plans to deliver Lustre servers on top of Sun's open source Solaris ZFS solution.

"This acquisition, coupled with the recent announcement of the Sun Constellation System, the most open petascale capable HPC architecture in the industry, shows our long-term commitment to the open source community and leadership in HPC," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "Adding the Lustre technology to our already broad and innovative product line-up will strengthen our portfolio and enable Sun and our partners to offer customers an even more complete and open HPC solution."

"Lustre provides network centric scalability for storage that is well matched with the complete and open Sun Constellation System architecture for petascale levels of performance. This is a clean and extremely scalable approach to provide high bandwidth and low latency access to large amounts of data for HPC applications," says Peter Braam, CEO, Cluster File System, Inc. "Our team is tremendously excited about joining Sun and furthering the mission of extreme scale computing.

We have already worked together to deliver several large clusters, for example the fastest supercomputer in Asia at Tokyo Tech and we're now in the process of installing a 500+ TeraFlop and 1.7 PetaByte cluster at Texas Advanced Computing Centre (TACC)."