OrangeFS

This is the OrangeFS Wiki

Orange File System is a branch of the Parallel Virtual File System. Like PVFS, Orange is a parallel file system designed for use on high end computing (HEC) systems that provides very high performance access to disk storage for parallel applications. OrangeFS is different from PVFS in that we have developed features for OrangeFS that are not presently available in the PVFS main distribution. While PVFS development tends to focus on specific very large systems, Orange considers a number of areas that have not been well supported by PVFS in the past. OrangeFS development tends to be driven by input from users with specific needs. To become one of these users open a dialog with the OrangeFS development team. PVFS design characteristics that are common with OrangeFS include:

• Performance
• Reliability
• Optimized MPI-IO support
• Hardware Independence
• Painless Deployment
• Research Platform

See the PVFS Home Page for further details on these characteristics.

There are a number of specific areas where Orange development has been focused over the last couple of years including: Metadata operations OrangeFS uses server-to-server collective communication to improve the scalability of metadata operations. OrangsFS is implementing distributed directories to make directory operations more scalable. Another project is developing the ability to search metadata as an alternative to traditional path lookup. Small, unaligned accesses OrangeFS is developing middleware driven caching on the client side including configurable semantics that provide a tradeoff between performance and consistency management. Cross-server redundancy Hardware failover provides a invaluable services for large storage systems. Some installations want additional redundancy, and smaller installations want redundancy without the high cost of hardware solutions. OrangeFS is developing configurable redundancy and fail-over mechanisms into the file system. These allow different files to have difference levels of redundancy as required by the application and also allow FS redundancy to the turned off for maximum performance. Secure access control OrangeFS has developed an access control method based on signed credentials and capabilities that works with federated authentication mechanisms and yet maintains performance characteristics. Current research is working on flexible access control schemas beyond simple userid based permissions. Improved documentation The OrangeFS project is working to be production ready including improving the documentation base for all of PVFS.

TracStartPage