XSEDE releases new online tutorial on using the Lustre file system

February 3, 2012

The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) project has released a new online tutorial titled "Using the Lustre File System" in CI-Tutor. This tutorial provides users of high-performance computing applications with a basic understanding of the Lustre file system and how to use it to achieve optimal I/O performance.

Lustre, a blend of the words Linux and cluster, is an open-source storage architecture for cluster computing environments. It is an object-based, parallel-distributed file system that enables scaling to tens of thousands of nodes, petabytes (PB) of storage, and high aggregate throughput up to hundreds of gigabytes per second. These features make Lustre advantageous for many scientific computing applications across a broad range of domains. Lustre file systems are used in computer clusters ranging from small workgroup clusters to large-scale, multi-site clusters. A number of the top supercomputers in the world use it, such as the Kraken XT5 at the National Institute for Computational Sciences/University of Tennessee. Information on XSEDE resources using Lustre can be found on the XSEDE Storage web page.

The content for the tutorial was provided by the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS), a joint project of the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Technical editing and instructional design was provided by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

CI-Tutor is hosted by NCSA and offers a number of tutorials covering topics in high-performance computing such as multi-core performance, performance tuning, large-scale parallel simulation, scientific visualization, and debugging. The tutorials are available free to everyone and can be accessed by registering and creating a login. To see a listing of the tutorials offered, go to the CI-Tutor course catalog. To login and take a course, go to the CI-Tutor homepage. Links to the tutorials are also available from the XSEDE User Portal Online Training web page.