LinuxHPC.org/Cluster Builder 1.3 - General Parallel File System

General Parallel File System

General Parallel File System (GPFS) is a cluster file system developed by IBM and available for AIX and Linux. The original work on GPFS began with the Tiger Shark file system, a research project at IBM's Almaden Research Center as early as 1993. The first commercial release of GPFS was made in 2001.

GPFS provides high performance by allowing data to be accessed over multiple computers at once. Most existing file systems are designed for a single server environment, and adding more file servers does not improve performance. GPFS provides higher input/output performance by "striping" blocks of data from individual files over multiple disks, and reading and writing these blocks in parallel. Other feature provided by GPFS include high availability, support for heterogeneous clusters, disaster recovery, security, DMAPI, HSM and ILM.

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