Intel Corp. has announced that it had acquired Whamcloud, a designer of Lustre file system solution for supercomputers and clusters. The takeover is a part of Intel's efforts to create exascale-class supercomputers by the end of the decade.

The Whamcloud acquisition extends Intel’s software and service portfolio in the high performance computing space in addition to reinforcing Intel’s position in the open source community. Working as one company, Whamcloud is in a stronger position to advance mutual goals with Intel and continue providing vendor neutral solutions, delivering greater value to its customers, and moving the industry to exascale performance.

Lustre is a parallel distributed file system, generally used for large scale cluster computing. Lustre is available under the GNU GPL (v2 only) and provides a high performance file system for computer clusters ranging in size from small workgroup clusters to large-scale, multi-site clusters. Because Lustre has high performance capabilities and open licensing, it is often used in super computers. At the present time, fifteen of the top 30 supercomputers in the world have Lustre file systems in them, including the world's fastest TOP500 supercomputer, IBM Sequoia, according to Wikipedia.

Lustre file systems are scalable and can support tens of thousands of client systems, tens of petabytes (PB) of storage, and hundreds of gigabytes per second (GB/s) of aggregate I/O throughput.

Whamcloud was established in 2010 by High-Performance Computing (HPC) experts Brent Gorda and Eric Barton when they recognized that future advances in computational performance were going to require a revolutionary advance in parallel storage. Whamcloud’s vision is to evolve the state of parallel storage by focusing strategically on high performance and cloud computing applications with demanding requirements for scalability.

Brent Gorda, the former president and CEO of Whamcloud, will become general manager of high performance data division at Intel. 

Tags: Intel, Whamcloud, Lustre, Exascale