MUNICH, Dec. 16 -- Today the European Open Filesystem (OSF) was initiated at the headquarters of ParTec Cluster Competence Center GmbH in Munich. As a legal form the Societas Cooperativa Europaea (SCE) was selected.

The purpose of this enterprise is to promote the establishment and adoption of an open source parallel filesystem, sustain and enhance its quality, capabilities and functionality and to ensure that the specific requirements of European organizations, institutions and companies are considered.

Further goals are:

• To facilitate the extension of business operations to non-members.
• To ensure that engagement and activities with other organizations will not directly or indirectly interfere with the intellectual property or other contractual and legal obligations of its members.
• To operate as a 'not for profit' organization.

The following 14 companies have joined today: Forschungszentrum Jülich, Bull GmbH, CEA/DAM, DataDirect Networks, Universities of Zürich, Switzerland and Paderborn, Germany, GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung GmbH, credativ GmbH, T-Platforms, HPCFS, Mellanox, Whamcloud, Leibniz Rechenzentrum(LRZ) and ParTec GmbH.

Prof. Dr. Dr. Thomas Lippert, director of Jülich Supercomputer Centre, stresses the fact that this is the first time that a European-wide consortium engages in the open source development of high speed filesystems. This European OSF SCE initiative will become a strong player on an international level.

Jean Gonnord, Chef de Project Simulation Numerique Simulation and Programming of CEA/DAM, stated: "Having an open source filesystem is a necessity for high end supercomputers computers producing  massive amounts of data. Such an important piece of the filesystem software cannot be made proprietary with no absolute guarantee of future access. This is the main reason why CEA has supported and will continue to support Lustre as an open source filesystem. As with any open source software, Lustre should be supported by the largest community of users. We hope that the organization will prioritize its development efforts to continually improve the functionality and stability of an open source code base."

Michael Gerhards, general manager Bull Germany, said: "We highly appreciate this initiative and we are very committed to the further development of Open Source Parallel Filesystems. Bull's customers are intensively using these filesystems and we want to contribute to the future of a stable and open environment for our customers."

"I am very pleased that the OSF SCE is now founded. I believe this co-operative provides a crucial platform for the development of a European centric Exascale filesystem whilst maintaining an important bridge to similar development efforts in the United States," said Hugo R. Falter, chief operating officer of ParTec Cluster Competence Center, GmbH.

About ParTec

ParTec Cluster Competence Center GmbH is specialized in the development and support of a comprehensive suite of cluster management tools and a runtime environment specifically tuned for the largest distributed memory supercomputers in existence today. ParaStation V5, an in-house developed, open-source cluster software stack provides a parallel environment for Linux clusters that provides our customers with the reliability, high availability and utilization levels they demand as they strive to meet their research goals whilst remaining within their power budgets. ParTec provides vendor-independent consultancy for a  broad range of cluster technologies and forms long standing customer relationships buy offering comprehensive support services in both remote and on-site scenarios. Our approach ensures rapid deployment cycles and seamless interoperability of software components. ParTec is member of major European and worldwide research consortia (e.g., PROSPECT, PRACE, D-GRID, Unicore, etc.) to further contribute to the development of exaFLOPS architectures of general purpose  supercomputers towards the end of this decade. The headquarters of ParTec are located in Munich, Germany.

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Source: ParTec GmbH