International Workshop on The Lustre Ecosystem:
Challenges and Opportunities

Keynote Speaker - March 3, 2015 @ 9:00am

Eric_Barton

Eric Barton, Lead Architect - High Performance Data Division, Intel

From Lab to Enterprise - Growing the Lustre Ecosystem

Abstract: Lustre's original feature set targeted the workflows of the leading DOE labs who funded and supported its development. As the Lustre ecosystem grows, the workflows Lustre must support are becoming increasingly diverse, demanding corresponding expansion of its core feature set and the subsystems that operate around it. This talk describes how Lustre is maturing and growing to support the sometimes conflicting demands imposed by this diversity and outlines some significant areas for future development with a view to promoting ongoing discussion in the community.

Biography: Eric received his BSc in Computer Science at Edinburgh University in 1979 and then studied at the California Institute of Technology, focusing on CAD and parallel processing. He curtailed these studies to join Inmos where he helped to implement the silicon design system which was used to create the Transputer. In 1985 Eric co-founded Meiko Ltd to build massively parallel systems based first on the Transputer, then on Sparc using Transputer networks as the communications fabric. The final generation of Meiko computers, based on Sparc plus Elan/Elite had a scalable RDMA fabric around which Eric's team built a complete parallel programming environment including a parallel job scheduler, communications libraries, I/O staging libraries and a parallel file system. In 1996 Eric left Meiko to work as an independent consultant and in 2002 was engaged by Cluster File Systems to work on Lustre. He continued to work on Lustre, becoming Lead Engineer of the Lustre Group in 2007 when Sun Microsystems acquired CFS. In 2010, after Oracle had acquired SUN, Eric left Oracle to co-found Whamcloud, Inc. to assure the continued development and support of Lustre as an Open Source GPL filesystem. As CTO at Whamcloud Eric continued to lead Lustre development and secured a contract with the DOE for Whamcloud to lead the Fast Forward Storage & IO project with partners Cray, DDN, EMC, the HDF group and Intel. Eric joined Intel in 2012 when Intel acquired Whamcloud and now is lead architect of the High Performance Data Division.