Open in the cloud.  It’s a concept gaining traction, with several entities seeking ways in which they can contribute or participate in its growth and development.  To this end, a new coalition of high performance computing leaders are taking matters into their own hand, forming a community-based open-source file system alliance.  Participants include Cray, Data Direct Networks (DDN), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

The group has announced the incorporation of Open Scalable File Systems, Inc. (OpenSFS), a California-based nonprofit mutual benefit corporation.  This will support the open-source project, addressing all the requirements of a data-intensive computing community, fostering practical development of high performance computing storage software tech.

It’s a mouthful, but the organization is heavily focused on the high-end computing systems, supported by open-source file system technologies.  It’s an area that gets overlooked, especially with the acquisitions that larger corporations have taken on in the past year, neglecting several projects that may have been a part of the assimilated company.  What OpenSFS is looking to do is provide a forum for collaboration among those deploying file systems on HPC systems, as well as keep Lustre file system developers up to date with supported releases and future requirements.

“Lustre plays an important role for our customers who need high performance I/O capabilities to support some of the most scalable, highest performing production supercomputers on the planet,” said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray.

“Cray is committed to the continuing success of Lustre for Cray users and the broader Lustre community. We are excited to play a founding role with other leaders in the HPC community in launching OpenSFS, helping to ensure that Lustre will continue to evolve to meet these needs.”

The Lustre support is central to the OpenSFS project, as it supports several HPC requirements, and has a diverse development community as open-source software.  This is, effectively, an effort to revive Lustre from dying a slow death, with several members of the cloud industry pulling together for the cause.

Dave Vellante speaks on Oracle’s own neglect of Lustre, which was an inevitable result of the Sun Microsystems acquisition earlier this year: “NFS just doesn’t cut it at the scale that many top supercomputer sites need. Oracle isn’t committed to Lustre so the industry needs to step up and provide support for this important open source movement. Lustre isn’t a big science project, it involves real organizations and real dollars and it’s encouraging to see Cray and DataDirect Networks teaming with two large supercomputer users to bring credibility to the movement.”

In other open cloud news, Hadoop World took place earlier this year, with a big push from several supporters, including Twitter. TheCUBE was there, covering the entire event live. See some of our highlights here.