Fraunhofer Updates FhGFS Parallel File System

The Competence Center for HPC at the Fraunhofer ITWM in Kaiserslautern, Germany, announces the new release of FhGFS.

After several publicly available beta releases, the official stable version, named 2012.10-r1, can be downloaded. As always, the download is free of charge and Fraunhofer provides commercial support.

With the first release of FhGFS in 2007, Dr. Franz-Josef Pfreundt, director of the Competence Center, promised "a flexible, robust and easy-to-use parallel file system for everybody".

While these are still important aspects of FhGFS development, the new release introduces some improvements and features, which have been demanded by the users.

Many of the improvements result in a significant increase in performance and scalability, especially in terms of metadata operations. In benchmarks performed with the beta release, a single metadata server could create about 35,000 files per second and by using 20 metadata servers to distribute the load, it was possible to achieve file creation rates of over 500,000 operations per second. These and other benchmarking results were shown at SC12 in Salt Lake City, UT.

FhGFS adds a capability by introducing on-the-fly replication of file contents and metadata with this release. With this step towards built-in HA FHGFS is moving towards an enterprise parallel file system.

Details about the changes in FhGFS