The OrangeFS Project

is work that revolves around OrangeFS, a scale-out network file system designed for use on high-end computing (HEC) systems that provides very high-performance access to multi-server-based disk storage, in parallel. The OrangeFS server and client are user-level code, making them very easy to install and manage. OrangeFS has optimized MPI-IO support for parallel and distributed applications, and it is leveraged in production installations and used as a research platform for distributed and parallel storage.

OrangeFS is now part of the Linux kernel as of version 4.6. As this version of the kernel becomes widely available, it will simplify the use of parallel storage by Linux applications through OrangeFS.

The OrangeFS project has developed diverse methods of parallel access including Linux kernel integration, native Windows client, HCFS-compliant JNI interface to the Hadoop ecosystem of applications, WebDAV for native client access and direct POSIX-compatible libraries for pre-loading or linking.

The OrangeFS project continues to push the envelope of file system research while bringing high-performance parallel storage to production-ready releases.

Recent work has been focused around v3 core and the upstream Linux kernel work. The goal is to optimize the filesystem for the majority of the real world research computing workloads and not focus on benchmarks that represent a minority of the workloads.