Posted on Wednesday, July 18 2012 @ 22:10 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
X-bit Labs
writes Intel has bought Whamcloud, a designer of Lustre file system solutions for supercomputers and clusters. The acquisition fits in Intel's goal towards the creation of exascale-class supercomputers by the end of the decade.
The Whamcloud acquisition extends Intel’s software and service portfolio in the high performance computing space in addition to reinforcing Intel’s position in the open source community. Working as one company, Whamcloud is in a stronger position to advance mutual goals with Intel and continue providing vendor neutral solutions, delivering greater value to its customers, and moving the industry to exascale performance.
Lustre is a parallel distributed file system, generally used for large scale cluster computing. Lustre is available under the GNU GPL (v2 only) and provides a high performance file system for computer clusters ranging in size from small workgroup clusters to large-scale, multi-site clusters. Because Lustre has high performance capabilities and open licensing, it is often used in super computers. At the present time, fifteen of the top 30 supercomputers in the world have Lustre file systems in them, including the world's fastest TOP500 supercomputer, IBM Sequoia, according to Wikipedia.
