ROMIO

I’m itching to discard some of the little-used file system drivers in ROMIO.
Keep:

• GPFS: IBM’s GPFS file system still sees several key deployments
• NFS: It’s everywhere, even though implementing MPI-IO consistency
  semantics over NFS is difficult at best

• TESTFS: I find this debugging-oriented file system useful occasionally.
• UFS: the generic Unix file system driver will be useful for as long as
  POSIX APIs are present.

• PANFS: Panasas still contributes patches.
• XFS: SGI’s XFS file system is part of SGI’s MPT, and they still contribute
  patches

• PVFS2: Recent versions are called “OrangeFS”, but the API is still the same and still provides several optimizations not available in other file system drivers.
• Lustre: deployed on a big chunk of the fastest supercomputers.

Deprecate/Delete:

• PIOFS: IBM’s old parallel file system for the SP/2 machine.
• BlueGene/L: superseded by the BlueGene driver, itself superseded by GPFS.
• BlueGene: The architecture-specific pieces were merged into a “flavor” of
  gpfs for Blue Gene.

• BGLockless: this hack (see the bglockess page) lived on far longer than it
  should have.

• GridFTP: I don’t know if this even compiles any more.
• NTFS: MPICH has dropped Windows support for several years now.
• PVFS: superseded by PVFS2 ten years ago.
• HFS: The HP/Convex (remember convex?) parallel file system. I found a
  mention of a machine deployed in 1995.

• PFS: the paragon (!) file system.
• SFS: the “Supercomputing File System” from NEC.
• ZoidFS: an old research project for a filesystem-independent protocol for
  I/O forwarding. While the ZoidFS driver might work, we know that folks
  trying to resurrect the old IOFSL project in 2015 are finding it…
  challenging.

Do you use a file system on the Deprecate/Delete list? Please let me ([email protected]) know!

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