Author: Sorin Faibish

Few weeks ago I was invited to present the state of the pNFS to the Purdue University. They are interested to be one of the early adopters and I jumped on that opportunity to promote pNFS. The presentation included the deep dive in the protocol and the need for scalability and I continued with the current state of the protocol and the initial client implementations in Linux and Open Solaris.

The presentation and the discussion that followed addressed some basic questions that I expected around why should users trust that NFSv4.1/pNFS will not have the same faith as NFSv4.0. This is a legitimate question that often the pNFS developers in Linux ask themselves and the answer that I gave was same as the developers; pNFS will address many of the HPC needs. After additional details on scalability, performance, availability all the people in the room agreed that it is worth to look closer at pNFS. I recommended them to start looking at the current Fedora distribution that has both server and client pNFS file layout.

As Purdue is a heavy Lustre user, they further asked how would Lustre support pNFS. If you didn’t know, there are patches available for Lustre to support pNFS. I introduced Purdue team to the chief developer of Lustre so they can be the first to test the prototype patches.

This will help the promotion of pNFS in academia.

We need to continue our team effort to promote everywhere in universities pNFS.

Last week I attended the annual Massive Storage System Technologies 2010 Symposium in Tahoe. Most of the audience was from the National Labs, NASA, and Supercomputing centers. The discussions were mostly focused on the next exascale generation of storage and I was invited to present the pNFS as one of the major future technologies that will address the scalability issues related to the high I/O throughput requirements of HPC and SC. My presentation was very well received and many participants were not new to the pNFS and NFSv4.1. During the discussions after the presentation I asked the audience if anybody used already pNFS and I got some 4 votes. But when I asked who is considering using pNFS in the near future I got some 80 hands (out of 140 in the room). More interesting about the interest in pNFS was the fact that one of the storage managers of CERN presented unsolicited his latest use of pNFS by CERN scientists. It was the first time a user not close to the pNFS community presented to the researcher the use of pNFS.

Additional discussion was related to the reasons why NFSv4.1 will not have the same faith of NFSv4.0 which was supposed to bring new features to the NFSv3 and didn’t become a replacement of NFSv3. I just want to mention that this HPC community was always “hating” NFSv3 but they couldn’t live without it. The next question was what took us so long to get the NFSv4.1 and pNFS out of the door. Of course my answer was that we ensured that NFSv4.1 will have enough value added so it will not have the same faith as NFSv4.0. I am not sure that I was very convincing so perhaps we can try to organize a panel at SNIA to try to address this issue.