BeeGFS was originally developed at the Fraunhofer Center for High Performance Computing in Germany by a team led by Sven Breuner.
[3] BeeGFS started in 2005 as an in-house development at Fraunhofer Center for HPC to replace the existing file system on the institute's new compute cluster and to be used in a production environment.
Among those are academic users such as universities and research facilities[6] as well as commercial companies in fields like the finance or the oil & gas industry.
The design allows a file system administrator to start the services in any combination on a given set of machines and expand in the future.
BeeGFS supports various network-interconnects with dynamic failover such as Ethernet or Infiniband as well as many different Linux distributions and kernels (from 2.6.16 to the latest vanilla).
Besides managing and administrating the BeeGFS installation, this tool also offers a couple of monitoring options to help identify performance issues within the system.
Possible use cases for the tool are manifold; a few include setting up a dedicated parallel file system for a cluster job (often referred to as burst-buffering), cloud computing or fast and easy temporary setups for testing purposes.
The driver enables two main workflows: Container access and visibility into the file system is restricted to the intended directory.
General features of a POSIX file system such as the ability to specify permissions on new directories are also exposed, easing integration of global shared storage and containers.
This notably simplifies tracking and limiting container consumption of the shared file system using BeeGFS quotas.
Some of the aspects that BeeGFS developers are working on under the scope of this project are: The plan is to keep the POSIX interface for backward compatibility but also allow applications more control over how the file system handles things like data placement and coherency through API extensions.