Sun is showing thought leadership in solving pressing customer
problems - such as how to scale performance across a network with access to many servers, and creating a global name space - through its Parallel Network File System (pNFS) efforts (an extension of the NFS 4.1 specification.)
The pNFS code is now available for developers to work with on opensolaris.org – the first major code contribution of pNFS to this community. To demonstrate interoperability , Sun hosted the NFSv4.1 Bakeathon in Austin, TX June 11-15.
pNFS is being designed to provide clients with direct, parallel data
transfers from many data servers. Data and meta data are kept separate
to permit this direct data access and to allow for the creation of a
global name space. Beyond HPC, a portion of the work in film post
production or animation involves very large files where the computation isn't high.
Sun invented NFS, and is participating in the development of the specification for pNFS – an NFS standard that does not require proprietary software or hardware. Visit here for a good introduction to pNFS.
Lynn Roher's blog includes a nice explanatory diagram.
The Bakeathon in Austin was a way for Sun and other participants to work out the details of the draft standard, demonstrate interoperability and smoke out some bugs. Lisa Week's blog describes the Bakeathon in more detail.
Finally, take a look at what at what Robin Harris has to say on the topic.