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Computer maintenance workers at Kyoto University have announced that due to an apparent bug in software used to back up research data, researchers using the University's Hewlett-Packard Cray computing system, called Lustre, have lost approximately 77 terabytes of data. The team at the University's Institute for Information Management and Communication posted a Failure Information page detailing what is known so far about the data loss. The team, with the University's Information Department Information Infrastructure Division, Supercomputing, reported that files in the /LARGEO (on the DataDirect ExaScaler storage system) were lost during a system backup procedure. Some in the press have...

There are a lot of Linux filesystems comparisons available but most of them are anecdotal, based on artificial tasks or completed under older kernels. This benchmark essay is based on 11 real-world tasks appropriate for a file server with older generation hardware (Pentium II/III, EIDE hard-drive). Why another benchmark test? I found two quantitative and reproductible benchmark testing studies using the 2.6.x kernel (see References). Benoit (2003) implemented 12 tests using large files (1+ Gb) on a Pentium II 500 server with 512 MB RAM. This test was quite informative but results are beginning to aged (kernel 2.6.0) and mostly...