FraunhoferFS

The Fraunhofer Parallel File System, also known as FraunhoferFS and abbreviated FhGFS, is a parallel file system, optimized for usage in the field of High Performance Computing. The most important aspect is data throughput. It is developed at the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics (ITWM) in Germany. FhGFS can be downloaded and used free of charge.DesignAccess to user data is parallelized by dividing the data into so-called chunks. The chunks are stored distributed and independent of each other on multiple servers. The management of metadata and the mapping of a file to the appropriate chunks is done by a special metadata server. FhGFS supports distributed metadata over multiple servers. The internal connection of the servers is done by using either Infiniband (RDMA) or TCP/IP connections (Ethernet, IPoIB).The developers put their priorities on scalability, flexibility (e.g. support of multiple network interfaces and dynamic failover) and ease of use (e.g. by integrating their own graphical tools).DeploymentFhGFS is currently deployed at several supercomputing sites, including some of the fastest computer clusters in the world.See also Distributed file system List of file systems, the distributed parallel file system section