By jfranklin

Continuing our 2014 goal to provide greater visibility into our inner workings, OpenSFS is providing monthly posts describing our work and efforts surrounding Lustre.

Our executive committee, made up of the Community Representative Director and 5 board members from Cray, Intel, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Oak Ridge National Laboratories (ORNL), and Xyratex, along with the operations management team (VTM Group) and our legal counsel, meets weekly to discuss OpenSFS priorities.

One top priority discussed in January was the 2014 budget. Budget priorities reflect of our strong commitment to promoting Lustre globally. Weekly discussions with EOFS, the European open source file systems community organization, have begun with Hugo Falter (ParTec), Eric Monchalin (Bull), and Frank Baetke (HP). The intent is that these meetings will ultimately broaden community participation on both sides of the Atlantic.

On the personnel side, we’re pleased to announce Jason Hill will be serving as interim Technical Working Group chair for OpenSFS. As the storage team lead at ORNL’s National Center for Computational Sciences (NCSS), Jason brings a wealth of experience in architecting, deploying, and managing large-scale Lustre file systems. He was jointly responsible for the delivery of both the original Spider file system at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility as well as the follow on Spider II file system. Jason also brings leadership having managed a team of Lustre and HPSS experts at the NCCS. This is a key position in our Lustre development support. Congratulations Jason!

We are also currently in the process of electing a new Community Representative Director. The position runs annually from April to April, and the new director will be announced before LUG 2014.

The Lustre User Group (LUG) 2014 meeting takes place this spring April 8-10 in Miami, Florida. The LUG planning committee is meeting weekly to ensure that this year’s event provides all the technical topics the community is interested in and runs smoothly. Last year’s LUG was considered a great success, but the presentations schedule was probably a bit too jam packed. This year, we are looking to cut back slightly on the amount of official talks and allow more time for socializing and networking. The anticipated themes of the presentations include Lustre in the Enterprise, Big Data, Cloud, and Exascale. Participation in LUG is open to all.

We are excited to have your continued support and involvement in the Lustre community! We will continue to keep you updated on the workings of OpenSFS and our efforts on behalf of Lustre.

By jfranklin

Help us keep our OpenSFS and Lustre Wikipedia pages up to date and informative. Send suggestions to [email protected], or log into Wikipedia and edit the pages yourself.

Keep this a community effort.

By jfranklin

Nominations are now being accepted for candidates to serve as the 2014 OpenSFS Community Representative Director on the OpenSFS Board of Directors. This position will be open from April 2014 to April 2015.

Nominations must be emailed to [email protected] before 5pm Pacific Time, Thursday, January 31, 2014.

Please take a moment to give this nomination serious consideration.  The person selected for this position is responsible for representing the OpenSFS Supporter and Adopter Participants and has a full Board seat and voting rights to carry out that responsibility.   Community participation is growing and we want to be sure all Supporters and Adopters have a strong voice in the decisions made by the OpenSFS Board.  Your Community Board Member is guided by Supporter and Adopter values as the Board makes decisions for OpenSFS including how OpenSFS Development and Support funding is spent.

We’d like to thank Tommy Minyard from Texas Advanced Computing Center for his excellent service as as the 2013 Community Representative Director.

Expectations for the community representative are:

•  attend weekly board meetings and face-to-face meetings twice a year
•  gather input on important topics from OpenSFS Adopter and Supporter participants
•  attend the LUG 2014 and 2015 conferences
•  provide routine updates on board activities to OpenSFS participants

Nominations rules/criteria are as follows:

•  Each OpenSFS Adopter and Supporter Participant is eligible to nominate one candidate for consideration as the Community Representative Director.
•  The Community Representative Director is an important role in OpenSFS, and we encourage Adopter and Supporter Participants to submit nominations.

Any individual meeting the requirements set forth in Section 6.4 of the Bylaws (as outlined below) is eligible for nomination for the upcoming term.

Nominations must be emailed to [email protected] before 5pmPacific Time, Thursday, January 31, 2013. OpenSFS will acknowledge the receipt of each nomination via return email.

As described in more detail in the OpenSFS Bylaws, within 30 days after the nomination process has been completed, a meeting of the Promoters will be held at which the Community Representative Director may be elected from among the candidates nominated.

Nominations must include:

1. The name of the Nominee.
2. The name of the employer of the Nominee.
3. The name of the Participant making the nomination and an indication of the Participant’s participation level in OpenSFS (Adopter or Supporter).

All Nominees must meet the requirements set forth in Section 6.4 of the Bylaws, which states:

“An individual serving as the Community Representative Director (A) may not be a Representative of any Promoter; (B) may be a Representative of a Supporter or Adopter and (C) must have meaningful experience in the development, marketing, implementation and/or use of software substantially similar to, or with comparable functionality to, software of the type comprising an OpenSFS Stack.”

Although the Nominee’s CV and/or other background information is not required to be submitted with the Nomination, OpenSFS may request additional information if clarification is needed regarding the individual’s ability to serve or qualifications under Section 6.4.

Thank you again for your support.  As a community let’s move forward to make 2014 the best year yet for OpenSFS and see all of you at LUG2014 in Miami from April 8-10, 2014, see https://opensfs.org/lug14/ for more details.

By jfranklin

OpenSFS prides itself on being deeply committed to the philosophy of open source development. We bring together a wide range of organizations and individuals to solve problems that move open source file system development forward. Our “hands-on” working group structure means that OpenSFS Participants get deeply involved and can make a real difference.

In the spirit of open source, we want to provide greater visibility into OpenSFS inner workings as well. Please look for us to provide updates on OpenSFS discussions and progress as we move forward in 2014. As always, comments and questions are welcome.

For our first 2014 post, we wanted to take a quick look back on the accomplishments of last year. It was a big year for us! Lustre made some astounding strides forward.

In 2013, OpenSFS added two new Participants (Fujitsu and NCSA) while Intel moved up to Promoter level and joined the OpenSFS board. OpenSFS also pushed enhancements to our communications and marketing efforts, added more mature management infrastructure, continued funding the Lustre tree contract and added more Lustre development funding, supported enhanced feature availability, and had a significant hand in building a stronger foundation that the Lustre vendor ecosystem relies on for their product lines.

In particular, we continued to contribute financially to Lustre. We spent over $3 million on Lustre technical development and maintenance in 2013, our largest annual commitment to date. The result is that Lustre is healthier than ever, adding features that will directly benefit HPC, Big Data, and Enterprise users.

Highlights from 2013

·       Major releases of Lustre 2.4 and 2.5: Lustre 2.4 brought a new set of features that extend the capabilities of Lustre significantly, including Distributed Namespace (DNE), also known as “Clustered Metadata Servers,” providing horizontal scalability of metadata performance. Lustre 2.5 featured the highly anticipated Hierarchal Storage Management (HSM) functionality, often a core requirement in Enterprise and Big Data environments.

·      Opened the Community Lustre Portal at lustre.opensfs.org: Resources for Lustre developers now available in one convenient spot.

·      First Annual APAC LUG13 (Asia-Pacific Lustre User Group 2013): OpenSFS hosted the inaugural APAC LUG events held first in Beijing, China, and then in Tokyo, Japan. Attendance was exceptional and marked a big accomplishment for OpenSFS and the Lustre community, building better connections out to the Lustre community worldwide.

·      Largest LUG13 (Lustre User Group 2013): The largest attended LUG so far, Lustre users and developers had many reasons to celebrate with the announcement of multiple Lustre installations now breaking the 1TB/sec data access speed barrier (Fujitsu’s K computer and NCSA’s Bluewaters) and on-going announcements of multiple new Lustre installations worldwide. The next LUG 2014 will be held in Miami, Florida, from April 8-10. For more information please see: www.opensfs.org/lug14/

·      Welcomed our new Community Representative Director, Tommy Minyard, director of Advanced Computing Systems at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). The position is re-elected annually in April, if you are an Adopter or Supporter level OpenSFS Participant and want to nominate the next individual, please let us know.

·      Big presence at SC13 (Supercomputing Conference 2013): Held in the beautiful Denver, Colorado, OpenSFS sponsored the popular Lustre Birds of a Feather (BoF) session, displayed new Lustre Testimonials in our booth, and made face-to-face connections with a wide range of Lustre developers and users.

·      Continued Partnership with EOFS at the ISC13 (International Supercomputing 2013): OpenSFS organized a popular Lustre BoF focused on European issues, sponsored a breakfast panel with multiple Lustre experts explaining the expansion of the Lustre file system and its growth past traditional HPC into the broader Big Data space, and, of course, spent much time on the show floor talking Lustre with developers and users.

·      LAD13 (Lustre Administrators and Developers 2013) workshop: Sometimes known as the “Europe LUG,” our partnership with EOFS continues to be a key activity, connecting European users and vendors with their North American counterparts.

·      On-going Lustre development: OpenSFS continues to work on managing community testing under a contract with Indiana University, as well as hosting an open system for Lustre development and testing.

Expectations for 2014

2013 was a big year for Lustre, but we are not slowing down. We are starting off 2014 with great momentum in membership and funding. The Lustre User Group (LUG) 2014 will be our biggest ever. And new Lustre releases will push Lustre even more into the limelight.

Our priorities this year focus on our commitment to the Lustre community. We will continue to promote, protect, and advance Lustre through direct funding of Lustre development, sponsorship and management of community events, and Lustre community coordination. Fostering broader community development and community stewardship of Lustre releases is key.

Lustre could make a major difference in your industry this year. Join us!

We wish you the best for 2014 and look forward to your continued support and involvement in the Lustre community!

By jfranklin

In this video from the DDN User Meeting at SC13, Brent Gorda from the Intel High Performance Data Division presents: “Moving Lustre Forward: Status & Roadmap.”