IBM breaks speed records with new version of file system

On thursday,IBM and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced the results of "Project Fastball," a performance test of the latest release (2.3) of their General Parallel File System. GPFS was invented by IBM in 2001 as an experiment in clustered file systems, where data is accessed over multiple computers at once. Most existing file systems are designed for a single server environment, and adding more file servers does not improve performance. GPFS provides higher input/output performance by "striping" blocks of data from individual files over multiple disks, and reading and writing these blocks in parallel.

"Computing capability has been growing very fast, but the file system capacity has not kept up," IBM engineer Dr. Rama Govindaraju said.

Project Fastball achieved a new speed record of over 102 gigabytes per second of sustained read/write performance to a single file. The record was achieved using 416 individual storage controllers combined with 104 Power-based eServer p575 nodes (each p575 node has eight dual-core 2.2 GHz POWER5+ processors).