We would like to announce some recent events in the PVFS project. For a few years there have been two collaborative branches of development, the main PVFS (Blue) branch led from Argonne National Lab and the OrangeFS (Orange) branch led from Clemson. Orange was initially a project to focus on developing several new features and technologies on the PVFS platform, such as improved metadata operations, improved small, unaligned access, secure access control and server redundancy. As the separate branches continued, the two teams have collaborated and ultimately merged most if not all changes from the PVFS 2.8x line into OrangeFS.
Now, the roles have reversed. Rob Ross and his team at ANL are working in different areas and for the foreseeable future Clemson will be leading PVFS development. ANL is still a key part of the PVFS community, just as Clemson has played a major role through the previous years. One Item we have decided though is to retain the OrangeFS name and its home web site http://www.orangefs.org . Simply put, OrangeFS is PVFS. As of fall 2010 OrangeFS has become the focus of PVFS development efforts. So why the name change? PVFS was originally conceived as a research parallel file system and later developed for production on large high performance machines such as the BG/P at Argonne National Lab. OrangeFS is taking a slightly different approach to support a broader range of large and medium systems and to address a number of areas including security, redundancy, and metadata performance with more diverse clients. We feel the new name represents a new phase in the life of the last truly open-source, community-developed parallel file system. As before, the user, developer, and research communities are important contributors to not only the code but the health of the project. All OrangeFS code and future development will be open source and freely available via the OrangeFS/PVFS code repository. There will be no proprietary features or releases. At SC10, we introduced the first production release of OrangeFS along with an experimental release that includes an implementation of distributed directories. At meetings during SC10 we spent time talking with members of the community and the response to the work being done on OrangeFS was positive. Continuing discussions of OrangeFS and previous PVFS releases will all remain on the same PVFS mailing lists and we will continue to maintain PVFS.org as well as OrangeFS.org. Also at SC10, a commercial entity, Omnibond Systems LLC., which has a continuing relationship with Clemson University, started offering commercial grade services via a per-server subscription model. Omnibond Systems LLC. has also contributed significant development and marketing resources to OrangeFS. These offerings should extend the reach of PVFS to a broader audience that require paid support options and also provide added development resources as subscriptions are sold. Omnibond fully supports the open source development model and wants the entire project to remain open source. Information about OrangeFS support can be found at http://www.omnibond.com/orangefs . If you have any questions, concerns, or ideas about OrangeFS and PVFS we would welcome your input. You can contact us via the mailing lists or email directly to [email protected]. Thank you for your support, Walt Ligon & the entire PVFS/OrangeFS team _______________________________________________ Pvfs2-developers mailing list [email protected] http://www.beowulf-underground.org/mailman/listinfo/pvfs2-developers
