GFS is a SAN-type high-speed shared file system for HPC, which NEC is providing in its vector supercomputer SX series and scalar server TX7 series. It allows users to share files among heterogeneous HPC servers via the network file system (NFS) interface, and realizes high-speed file access to large capacity data by allowing direct access to the storage via a FC-SAN configured with fibre channels.

With this product NEC has realized highly reliable, high-speed and flexible file system operation suitable for a HPC environment, in which large volumes of data are managed. This is realized by integrating the GFS onto the dedicated file server in the NEC Storage NV series, and integrating high reliability and availability (failure resiliency) provided by cluster configuration and high-speed file access performance of the GFS.

The main features of GFS include:

• High-speed file access: GFS realized high-speed file access performance, exploiting the high bandwidth (2Gbps, 4Gbps) of fibre channels by directly transferring large capacity data from the HPC server to the storage. GFS also allows more than ten times throughput performance compared to the NFS, depending on the SAN configurations.
• Flexible file system: Dynamic expansion is available when the file system is in operation. When the capacity of the file system is approaching its maximum, GFS allows the file system to be extended without suspension of operation. GFS is a file system based on NFS, and its user interface is fully compatible with NFS. Therefore, an application running on NFS can be executed on GFS without changing applications.
• Highly reliable file server operation realized by complete cluster configuration: NV7300G is a file server configured with two nodes cluster, and is a gateway model of NEC's Storage NV series with GFS. When a failure occurs in one node, operation is immediately handed over to the other node. Network and storage paths are also redundant to realization of high reliability and scalability as a GFS file server.

NEC Storage NV7300G (gateway/cluster configuration model) for file servers Client machine platforms include:

• NEC vector supercomputer SX Series
• NEC scalar server TX7 series (Linux)
• SGI Altix
• SUN: x86 architecture machines

NEC is installing NEC Storage NV7300G and GSTORAGEFS as a high-speed shared file system for 72 SX series systems (576CPUs) to an NEC SX user, High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS). The system being installed achieved a high throughput of 7.85GB/s per single 80TB file system configured as a GFS on the NV7300G.