P

Parallel File System

Definition

A parallel file system is a type of distributed file system that stripes data across multiple storage servers to provide concurrent access from many clients. Unlike traditional NAS, parallel file systems allow thousands of compute nodes to read and write simultaneously with aggregate bandwidth that scales linearly with the number of servers. Examples include Lustre, GPFS/Spectrum Scale, BeeGFS, and WekaIO.

Daniel Kovacs
Written by
Daniel Kovacs
Updated Feb 11, 2026

Related Terms

A

Ansible

An open-source IT automation tool for configuration management and orchestration, widely used for HPC cluster and data center provisioning.
B

BeeGFS

A high-performance parallel file system with distributed metadata, simple administration, and built-in high availability for HPC and AI workloads.
B

Burst Buffer

A fast intermediate storage layer using NVMe SSDs that absorbs I/O bursts between compute nodes and the parallel file system.
C

Ceph

An open-source distributed storage platform providing unified object, block, and file storage with automatic data distribution and self-healing capabilities.
C

CXL

Compute Express Link — an open interconnect standard enabling high-speed communication and memory sharing between CPUs, accelerators, and memory devices.
D

Data Lake

A centralized repository storing raw data in its native format at scale, supporting diverse analytics workloads from batch to real-time processing.