[2] For example, it is the filesystem of the Summit [3] at Oak Ridge National Laboratory which was the #1 fastest supercomputer in the world in the November 2019 Top 500 List.
The disjoint sequences are arranged to correspond to individual processes of a parallel application, allowing for improved scalability.
[12][13] The main difference between the older and newer filesystems was that GPFS replaced the specialized interface offered by Vesta/PIOFS with the standard Unix API: all the features to support high performance parallel I/O were hidden from users and implemented under the hood.
[14]: xi In 2010, IBM previewed a version of GPFS that included a capability known as GPFS-SNC, where SNC stands for Shared Nothing Cluster.
It breaks a file into blocks of a configured size, less than 1 megabyte each, which are distributed across multiple cluster nodes.
Hadoop's HDFS filesystem, is designed to store similar or greater quantities of data on commodity hardware — that is, datacenters without RAID disks and a storage area network (SAN).
An administrator can create tiers of storage by grouping disks based on performance, locality or reliability characteristics.
Where the file data resides and how it is migrated is based on a set of rules in a user defined policy.