OpenSFS to fund Lustre HPC file system development

Morse not interested in forking the code

Brent Gorda, Whamcloud's chief executive officer and the DOE administrator who was cutting the cheques for the development of Lustre many years ago, was adamant back in July that Whamcloud did not want to fork the code-base. And now Norman Morse, the CEO at OpenSFS and formerly the data centre manager at Los Alamos National Laboratory (another DOE nuke lab), is similarly adamant that OpenSFS is not going to fork the Lustre code either.

"The focus of OpenSFS is complementary to what Oracle is doing, with their focus on Solaris and their own hardware," Morse explains. "Our focus is on Linux and HPC workloads. We definitely want to cooperate with Oracle. We are not intending to fork the code."

That said, the big HPC labs that may not be Oracle customers for much longer still need tech support. This is where Whamcloud, Xyratex, Cray, and DDN come in. They will offer support for Lustre file systems (and maybe even IBM and Hewlett-Packard will do so if the mood strikes them now that Oracle is backing away from traditional HPC system sales). OpenSFS wants to fund the companies that are offering that deep support to make sure someone is doing it. The non-profit also wants to fund the development of features to stabilise and then scale Lustre, as well as fund whatever future file system will be created to store data on exascale-class systems many years hence.

"There is a strong likelihood that the POSIX interface can't scale to systems of that size," says Galen Shipman, group leader of technology integration at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. "We'll focus on Lustre initially, but it could be something else in the long run." And that is why the organisation is not called OpenLustre.

At the moment, Oak Ridge has a contract with Cray for supporting its 13 PB of Lustre file systems. Lawrence Livermore was a CFS, then a Sun, and then an Oracle customer and is now looking to shop out support contracts once it moves off the Lustre 1.8 release that Oracle is now supporting. Seager says that part of the $2m in seed money that the four companies have put into the kitty to fund OpenSFS is for a support contract for Lawrence Livermore. And it is not a foregone conclusion that this support contract will go to Whamcloud, either, since it will be put out for bidding.

Morse says that OpenSFS will not have any programmers of its own, but will instead prioritise requirements coming out of the Lustre community and then fund development of features by paying third parties to do the work under contract. These could be individual developers or companies such as Whamcloud, Xyratex, Cray, DDN or Oracle. Whatever code is developed will be handed back to Oracle, and it is hoped that this code will be accepted by Oracle for inclusion in the Lustre tree.

Both Whamcloud and OpenSFS have similar hopes of cooperation with Oracle. But what happens if Oracle doesn't want to play it that way? At a certain point, the users of Lustre, through OpenSFS if they all join up, will have no choice but to fork the code. And to be more accurate, if all of the Lustre customers worldwide stand behind OpenSFS, endorse features, and fund their development, then it will be more accurate to say that whatever Oracle has in its Lustre implementation is the real fork.

I think it is safe to back the ones with the nukes over Larry Ellison if this should become a fight. ®