The Fraunhofer Parallel File System, also known as FraunhoferFS and abbreviated FhGFS, is a parallel file system, optimized for usage in the field of High Performance Computing. The most important aspect is data throughput. It is developed at the Fraunhofer

Fraunhofer Society

The Fraunhofer Society is a German research organization with 60 institutes spread throughout Germany, each focusing on different fields of applied science . It employs around 18,000, mainly scientists and engineers, with an annual research budget of about €1.65 billion...

 Institute for Industrial Mathematics (ITWM) in Germany. FhGFS can be downloaded and used free of charge.

Design

Access to user data is parallelized by dividing the data into so-called chunks. The chunks are stored distributed and independent of each other on multiple servers. The management of metadata

Metadata

The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...

 and the mapping of a file to the appropriate chunks is done by a special metadata server. FhGFS supports distributed metadata over multiple servers. Therefore file access should scale very well. The internal connection of the servers is done by using either Infiniband

InfiniBand

InfiniBand is a switched fabric communications link used in high-performance computing and enterprise data centers. Its features include high throughput, low latency, quality of service and failover, and it is designed to be scalable...

 (RDMA) or TCP/IP connections (Ethernet

Ethernet

Ethernet is a family of computer networking technologies for local area networks commercially introduced in 1980. Standardized in IEEE 802.3, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies....

, IPoIB).

The developers put their priorities on scalability, flexibility (e.g. support of multiple network interfaces and dynamic failover) and ease of use (e.g. by integrating their own graphical tools).

Deployment

FhGFS is currently deployed at several supercomputing sites, including some of the fastest computer clusters in the world.

See also

• Distributed file system
  Distributed file system
  Network file system may refer to:* A distributed file system, which is accessed over a computer network* Network File System , a specific brand of distributed file system...
  
  
• List of file systems, the distributed parallel file system section