Oracle may have a less than perfect rapport with some members of the open source community, with forks under way in two projects that it acquired through the Sun purchase, but it’s a different story with the filesystem Lustre.
According to Whamcloud, a startup focused on developing Lustre, Oracle is supportive of its efforts. Indeed, many former employees of the database giant now work with Whamcloud, and collaborate with their former colleagues.
Whamcloud’s contribution to the Lustre project are far-ranging, and include active development of solid-state SSD storage technology, and a collaboration with two national laboratories to power some of the fastest supercomputers in the world. Datamation takes a look.
The filesystem of choice for many of the top 500 supercomputers is the open source Lustre filesystem. Lustre started off as a Sun Microsystems effort and is now under the stewardship of Oracle. Though Oracle is the leader of the Lustre open source project, other vendors also participate in Lustre development. One such vendor is startup Whamcloud.
Oracle has had somewhat mixed success with its leadership of open source efforts that it acquired from Sun, with forks of OpenSolaris and OpenOffice now in progress. According to Whamcloud, with Lustre Oracle is playing nice with its open source community as development work continues to move the project forward.