Hi and welcome to my blog about clustering, high availability and storage in general. I worked for Cluster File Systems Inc(CFS), the company behind highly scalable file system Lustre which is now acquired by Sun Microsystems. I used to work for Sun Cluster product before joining CFS so it feels great to be back. I am going to dedicate this post to get readers acquainted with Lustre.
What is Lustre?
Lustre is a high performance, highly scalable cluster filesystem developed by CFS. It is open source and available freely under GPL. Lustre supports variety of commodity and proprietary hardware for compute nodes and networks.
Who uses Lustre and for what?
Lustre is designed for high performance computing but it has multiple tuning knobs that can be turned to make it suitable for general purpose scalable computing as well. Typically, Lustre is used for research in physics, fluid dynamics and nuclear weapon simulation, EDA and chip manufacturing, aerospace/automotive design, oil and gas exploration, seismic and geographic data analysis, digital video production, animation and image rendering farms and financial result analysis. For example, special effects in the latest Harry Potter movie are rendered on Lustre by FrameStore CFC. Many of the TOP500 Supercomputers in the world use Lustre as storage platform.
How does it work?
Lustre is an object based scalable storage platform. Lustre achieves scalability and performance by separating data path from metadata path. It has three main components namely, Lustre clients where customer applications run, metadata server (MDS) which handles filesystem namespace and object storage servers(OSS) which store the actual contents of the files. Lustre has excellent support for multiple types of networks like Gigabit ethernet, Infiniband, Myrinet, Elan etc and Lustre also supports mix of networks in same deployment. Though Lustre clients see storage as files and directories, inside Lustre an object represents the storage entity. Lustre achieves gigantic performance by spreading file contents over multiple object storage servers.
Where can I get Lustre?
Lustre is open source and free. You can download the latest version of Lustre from CFS download site
How to install and test Lustre?
Lustre comes with extensive documentation in the form of Lustre Manual. The manual for latest release can be found at http://www.manual.lustre.org. If you come across any problem while installing or configuring Lustre, feel free to drop an email on lustre-discuss@clusterfs.com and we will respond you.
More information about Sun and CFS
Sun completed Cluster File Systems acquisition on 1st Oct 2007. More information about acquisition can be found at http://www.sun.com/software/clusterfs/index.xml. The webpage also has an FAQ section which you should check out.
Coming Soon:
Next blog will be about detailed Lustre architecture and a sneak peek at Lustre on ZFS.
very good description atul.
Posted by amit on October 15, 2007 at 06:52 PM EST #
Hi, from my reading of http://www.sun.com/software/products/lustre/index.jsp this is not currently available on Solaris; is that correct?
Thanks.
Posted by Ceri Davies on October 15, 2007 at 11:10 PM EST #
Ceri,
We are currently working on porting Lustre to Solaris for server side. If you are interested in trying out beta sometime in coming months, do let us know.
Posted by Atul on October 15, 2007 at 11:22 PM EST #
Hi Atul,
Yes, please bear me in mind.
Thanks!
Posted by Ceri Davies on October 15, 2007 at 11:25 PM EST #
A good introduction!! Could you elaborate about the design, probably in the next post?
Posted by Anand on October 16, 2007 at 12:36 AM EST #