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.