Foundation of the European Open
File System (EOFS) Society
On December 16, 2010 the European
Open File System (EOFS) Society was
founded in Munich. The initiative to cooperate on this topic originated from
JSC. As a legal form the Societas
Cooperativa Europaea (SCE, European
Cooperative Society) was selected.
The purpose of this non-profit organization
is to
• promote the establishment and
adoption of an open source parallel
file system
• sustain and enhance its quality,
capabilities and functionality
• ensure that the specific requirements of European organizations,
institutions and companies are
considered
• initiate projects or to collaborate
with existing projects at regional,
national, European and international
level in order to support Research
& Development activities concerning
Open File Systems
• ensure that engagement and activities with other organizations will not
directly or indirectly interfere with
the intellectual property or other
contractual and legal obligations of
its members
• facilitate the extension of business
operations to non-members.
The following 14 organizations are
founding members:
Forschungszentrum Jülich, Bull GmbH,
CEA/DAM, Data Direct Networks, Universities of Paderborn and Zürich, GSI
Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung GmbH, credativ GmbH,
T-Platforms, HPCFS, Mellanox, Whamcloud, Leibniz Rechenzentrum (LRZ)
and ParTec GmbH.
At the founding meeting several members expressed their satisfaction
about the fact that it is the first time a
Europe wide consortium has engaged
in the open-source development of highspeed file systems. It was agreed that
such an important piece of file system
software should not be made proprietary with no absolute guarantee of
future access. On the contrary, the
organization should establish an open
source code base, prioritize the development efforts, and improve the functionality and stability of the underlying
parallel file system.
Furthermore, the intention was expressed
to build a bridge to similar development
efforts in the United States where in the
meantime two organizations were
founded around Open File Systems:
HPCFS and OpenSFS.
During the Lustre™ Users Group (LUG)
meeting - held in Orlando, Florida in
April 2011 - EOFS was the driving force
in bringing these two US organizations
together. Later all members of HPCFS
became members of OpenSFS and
OpenSFS changed bylaws and contributorship agreement as required by HPCFS.
The next logical step was to sign a
Memorandum of Understanding between
EOFS and OpenSFS at ISC’11 in
Hamburg, because they recognized that
to succeed in this endeavour it will require collaboration and cooperation to
meet their mutual goals, including
• sustaining and further developing the
Lustre™ open source parallel file
system
• promoting an open-source development model for the Lustre™ file
system
• promoting a forum for collaboration
that is vendor-neutral and
• protecting end users of the LustreTM
file system in the spirit of open
source.
The two organizations wanted to
establish a mechanism by which they
can peer with one another in order
to facilitate collaboration among working groups of each organization and
to establish a single canonical LustreTM
source repository and tracking
system for community development.
All this work can be considered as a big
success to form a single community
with global participation. It guarantees
the continued future of the LustreTM
file system supported by a large number
of strong supporters.
As an immediate next step EOFS
organized the first European LustreTM
Workshop in Paris in September 2011
where administrators and developers
from Europe and worldwide came together and exchanged their experiences, developments, tools and good
practices to run this parallel filesystem.
More information is available at the
EOFS website: www.eofs.org
• Klaus Wolkersdorfer
Jülich
Supercomputing
Centre
 top
|
index
prev
