We caught up with Brent Gorda, General Manager of Intel’s High Performance Data Division recently and asked him to give us an update on what was going on with the Lustre technology and community.

Q: Brent, what can you tell us about recent Lustre momentum in the HPC community?

A: We’ve seen strong growth in the use of Lustre and the move to newer versions. A majority of sites we work with have moved forward to a 2.5.x code base. This is a strong endorsement of the advances made over the past several years to add features and stability to the code and we appreciate the vote of confidence in our work. From a recently completed a community survey, we uncovered a multitude of configurations, applications and storage platforms used worldwide. Remember, Intel support for Lustre applies to organizations with whatever hardware they choose – separation of the storage hardware from the choice of software is a strength of open source and the team at Intel is here to help.

Q: How about progress with Lustre for the enterprise?

A: We are seeing signs of encouragement in Lustre’s ability to provide value for enterprise environments. PayPal, an eBay company, was very public about their use of Lustre – which they use to help support real-time fraud detection. The commercial community is not always open about the technologies they use, so it is particularly impactful to hear the PayPal story. From our experience, this is the tip of the iceberg and definitely a sign of things to come for the Lustre community.

Q: And what is relationship between Intel and OpenSFS?

A: We are excited by OpenSFS’s plan to organize the community and take on a larger share of the work that the team at Intel has been shouldering for several years.

The Intel team has led every community release of Lustre since 2010. OpenSFS recognized the importance of this work and has provided financial backing to offset some of the costs. Intel has been the leading group standing up to help the community get organized – through effort on software, releases, community activities and dollars. This was done to give the community time to get organized, get legs under it, and be able to take on the work itself. The goal is to have a vibrant open source project led by the community and not held by one company.

Q: Doesn’t Intel contribute significantly to other open source projects?

A: Intel has a strong history of contributing to open source projects. There are thousands of open source programmers here at Intel and the company is one of the largest contributors to Linux. We understand open source and are strong advocates for community-led projects, which is why we are happy to see OpenSFS step up and take the lead on releases for the community. Lustre v2.7 was recently announced and we are working to support OpenSFS as they take point on defining what releases are and when they will be available. We will be there helping, supporting, cheering and contributing – but as a supporter, not as the lead.

For Intel customers, rest assured that the team here is working to make Intel products for Lustre better every day. We have the team for this and we are aggressively growing. If you know someone who wants to work at a great company, please reach out or visit jobs.intel.com.

Q: The annual Lustre Users Group meeting was held recently. What were some of the more interesting things that came out of the conference?

A: One of the big topics at this year’s meeting was that of OpenSFS taking on the releases. This is a strong sign of maturity in the community and as I mentioned earlier, something we support. The major players, including Intel, are stepping up their community efforts to volunteer resources to ensure an open and available technology.

Q: What news can we expect around Lustre at the upcoming International Supercomputing Conference (ISC15) next month?

A: I can’t speak for OpenSFS or EOFS (their European counterpart), but with respect to Intel products for Lustre, we will be discussing new and significant relationships with major vendors as well as unveiling the next version of products we have been working on. It should be a fun and exciting time this year – I am looking forward to the opportunity to interact with the international computing community at ISC15.

Q: How can others get involved in the OpenSFS effort?

A: There are a number of ways to get more involved in OpenSFS. Organizations or individuals can contribute – code, money, testing, debugging, and even requesting and debating features that they want to see developed. More information can be found at www.OpenSFS.org.