Whamcloud and Fujitsu Collaborate on Lustre Development

Whamcloud, Inc. and Fujitsu Limited announced that both parties agreed to the principal terms of joint Lustre development.

This collaboration will include scalability and file system work for Lustre, and merging Fujitsu’s Lustre enhancements into the Lustre 2.x community release.

"Lustre is a central technology in our supercomputing products, and we look forward to working closely with Whamcloud, the leader in file system software technologies, to advance performance, add features and push supercomputing capabilities to new levels," said Yuji Oinaga, Head of Next Generation Technical Computing Unit at Fujitsu, the company that together with RIKEN is a joint developer of the world’s fastest supercomputer, the K computer. "Fujitsu is committed to being at the forefront of supercomputing technologies."

"Working with Fujitsu is an extreme honor, and we look forward to their Lustre enhancements benefiting the entire community," said Brent Gorda, CEO of Whamcloud. "Lustre is the most widely used file system in HPC and is deployed in the most extreme computing environments. Fujitsu’s rigorous quality standards are well known and this agreement is a great vote of confidence for the future of Lustre."

The K computer, which is being jointly developed by RIKEN and Fujitsu, is part of the High-Performance Computing Infrastructure (HPCI) initiative led by Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT).

Configuration of the K computer began in the end of September 2010, with availability for shared use scheduled for 2012. The K computer is the nickname RIKEN has been using for the supercomputer of this project since July 2010. K comes from the Japanese Kanji letter ‘Kei’ which means ten peta or 10 to the 16th power. The logo for the K computer based on the Japanese letter for ‘Kei’, was selected in October 2010. In its original sense, ‘Kei’ expresses a large gateway, and it is hoped that the system will be a new gateway to computational science.