Parallel File System

Sun HPC ClusterTools's Parallel File System (PFS) component provides high-performance file I/O for multiprocess applications running in a cluster-based, distributed-memory environment.

PFS file systems closely resemble UFS file systems, but provide significantly higher file I/O performance by striping files across multiple PFS I/O server nodes. This means the time required to read or write a PFS file can be reduced by an amount roughly proportional to the number of file server nodes in the PFS file system.

PFS is optimized for the large files and complex data access patterns that are characteristic of parallel scientific applications.