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BeeGFS stayin' alive with Intel OPA tie-up

Because what the world needs now is another HPC filesystem

The HPC-focussed parallel cluster file system, BeeGFS, has received certification to run over Intel's OmniPath Architecture (OFA).

The cert, plus a collaboration with Intel's OPA team, is a step forward for BeeGFS, which was spun out of Fraunhofer in 2014 and made the responsibility of ThinkParQ.

BeeGFS runs on Linux distros with kernels between 2.6.18 and 4.5, and is currently on the package list for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5-7, Fedora, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11/12 (and the OpenSuse equivalents), Debian 7 and 8, and Ubuntu.

In its certification tests, the filesystem was tested on dual-socket Broadwell Xeon systems (E5-2680v4) with OPA interconnect, and achieved more than 8 gigabytes/second write throughput for an IOR single stream benchmark, running at just 2.8 per cent CPU utilisation; and for an IOR benchmark with four file streams on the same setup, throughput was claimed to be better than 12 GB/second at 6.2 per cent CPU utilisation.

This, ThinkParkQ's canned blurb (PDF) claims, would support I/O of up to 120 GB/s in a single rack of 4U storage servers.

BeeGFS supports either IP or Infiniband-plus-VERBS for the communication channel. Its components are a management server, object storage server, metadata server, and a filesystem client, and for storage it can support any Posix-compatible local filesystem.

The BeeGFS client is GPL, while the server components are free and subject to the Fraunhofer EULA. ®

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