I was sat in a meeting recently where people were discussing\u00a0High Performance Computing options. Someone had found some money down the back of the sofa and asked the rest of us how we’d spend it if it were ours (For the record, I wanted some big-memory nodes — 512Gb RAM minimum).<\/p>\n
Halfway through the meeting someone asked about the parallel filesystem in use on Sheffield’s HPC systems and I answered Lustre<\/a> — not expecting any further comment. I don’t know much about parallel I\/O systems but I do know that all of the systems I have access to make use of Lustre. Sheffield’s Iceberg<\/a>, Manchester’s Computational Shared Facility<\/a>\u00a0and the UK National supercomputer, Archer<\/a> to name three. The Wikipedia page for Lustre<\/a> suggests that it is very widely used in the HPC community worldwide.<\/p>\n I was surprised, then, when this comment was met with derision from some in the room. One person remarked ‘It’s a bit…um…classic..isn’t it?’, giving the impression that it was old and outdated.\u00a0There was not much love for dear old Lustre it seemed!<\/p>\n There was no time in this meeting for me ask ‘What’s wrong with it then? Works fine for me!’so I did what I often do in times like this, I asked twitter:<\/p>\n Q for HPC followers. Is there anything wrong with using Lustre? Just been in a meeting where it was mocked as ‘classic’.<\/p>\n \u2014 Mike Croucher (@walkingrandomly) April 12, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n