Fujitsu to team with Whamcloud in Lustre development

Japan's Fujitsu targets major growth in high-perfomance computing and aims to promote its Lustre-based FEFS file system.

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Fujitsu said Tuesday it will work with Whamcloud to develop new features for the open-source Lustre file system aimed at high-performance computing.

The Japanese company, which built the supercomputer currently rated as the world's fastest, said it will team with Whamcloud to expand the capabilities of Lustre as well as get feedback from the open-source community.

Fujitsu launched sales of its FEFS (Fujitsu Exabyte File System) for PC clusters based on Lustre last month, and is hoping to spur adoption that will generate hardware and consulting contracts.

"We hope to work with Whamcloud to bring parts of FEFS into the Lustre project," said Fujitsu spokesman Kikuya Hanazato.

For Whamcloud, which offers technical support and other services for Lustre implementations, the tie-up with Fujitsu is a potential source of revenue as well as a vote of confidence for the open-source software that drives its business. The company, formed last year, said Lustre is currently used in 70 percent of the top 100 supercomputers worldwide.

The tie-up is part of an aggressive push by Fujitsu into large scale cluster computing. It is in the midst of a plan to generate 100 billion yen (US$1.3 billion) in revenue from hardware and software in the business by the fiscal year through March 2016, five times its current revenue in the area.

Financial details of the agreement were not released.

Lustre is a file system aimed at computer clusters that can scale up to thousands of machines, used in supercomputers as well as cloud computing applications. It was acquired by Oracle in its purchase of Sun Microsystems last year, but fears it would abandon the technology led to pledges of continued support from vendors and newer startups like Whamcloud.

On Monday, the Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers announced that Japan's K Computer had retained the No. 1 position. The computer was jointly developed by Fujitsu and the Riken science institute.