Understanding Lustre Internals

Lustre Architecture

What is Lustre?

Lustre is a GNU General Public licensed, open-source distributed parallel file system developed and maintained by DataDirect Networks (DDN). Due to the extremely scalable architecture of the Lustre file system, Lustre deployments are popular in scientific supercomputing, as well as in the oil and gas, manufacturing, rich media, and finance sectors. Lustre presents a POSIX interface to its clients with parallel access capabilities to the shared file objects. As of this writing, Lustre is the most widely used file system on the top 500 fastest computers in the world. Lustre is the file system of choice on 7 out of the top 10 fastest computers in the world today, over 70% of the top 100, and also for over 60% of the top 500.[1]

Lustre Features

Lustre is designed for scalability and performance. The aggregate storage capacity and file system bandwidth can be scaled up by adding more servers to the file system, and performance for parallel applications can often be increased by utilizing more Lustre clients. Some practical limits are shown in Table along with values from known production file systems.