SCIENCE

Whamcloud has announced the commitment to produce a Lustre distribution for the broad and growing community of Lustre developers and users. Lustre is a massively distributed parallel file system, widely used for large scale cluster computing. The Whamcloud team of development and support engineers will provide on-going support and services for the distribution and, importantly, push any Whamcloud modifications up to the canonical Lustre repository at lustre.org.

"We're extremely optimistic about Lustre and believe it is the obvious path to the exascale future. We've amassed some real technical firepower and want to assure the community there will be a supported Lustre distribution that isn't a fork," said Brent Gorda, CEO of Whamcloud. "The community is more energized than ever, and we're excited to step up our contribution to make sure Lustre continues to evolve and be easily available to all who depend on it."

The first availability of the Whamcloud Lustre distribution is expected this summer. It will be Lustre 2.1, since 2.x is the future of Lustre and many installed sites have already upgraded or are in active consideration for upgrading to Lustre 2.0. Whamcloud will develop a release schedule of regular releases following the "train" model.