The Future of Open-Source Filesystems for HPC – Competition, Cooperation or Consolidation?

This panel will address aspects of parallel filesystems which are key components of today’s HPC infrastructures but seem to be a bit underrepresented in discussions about the architecture of current and future high-end systems. At this panel we will focus exclusively on open-source filesystems as these clearly dominate the TOP500 list and specifically its higher ranks. The panelists represent at one side three open-source filesystems used today in production-ready HPC systems and at the other side major HPC centers with day-to-day experience at user, administrator and system-architect level. These two groups will be complemented by a more academic point of view in terms of architectural challenges and potential future developments. The panel will also widen its scope by addressing the opportunities, benefits and challenges of open-source developments for HPC systems in general and discuss alternative models that have been classified as the “Cathedral” and the “Bazaar” approach. It will also be discussed to what extend we will see either competition with proprietary offerings or cooperation potential to cover different and sometimes overlapping requirements. Finally, the panel will address the question of whether we will see more products targeted towards special workloads in contrast to a few general-purpose offerings with a wide usage spectrum. Note that the panel is definitely not about a comparison of features, roadmaps and performance numbers of different products and offerings – that is the subject of other sessions at ISC 2023.