6.1. GPFS description
GPFS is a major component of the IBM clusters offering. Its purpose is to satisfy the needs of the most demanding applications in terms of I/O throughput and resilience. This is obtained by combining the processing power and disk bandwidth of selected nodes and making them available to the whole cluster.
There are other file systems that can be used to provide shared and consistent access to files inside a cluster. Network File System (NFS) is still very much in use. However, if an NFS can be mounted on all the nodes in a cluster, the files are still served by a single node, and this quickly becomes a bottleneck. This single server architecture does not scale well when the number of client nodes increases.
The open source ...
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