BeeGFS (formerly FhGFS) Parallel File System

Allgemeine Informationen

BeeGFS started in 2005 as an in-house development at Fraunhofer ITWM to replace the existing file system on the institute’s new compute cluster and to be used in a production environment.

In 2007, the first beta version of the software was announced during ISC07 in Dresden, Germany and introduced to the public during SC07 in Reno, NV. One year later the first stable major release became available.

In 2014, Fraunhofer started its spin-off. The new company called ThinkParQ[3] will take over sales, customer service, and professional support. In this process, FhGFS was renamed and became BeeGFS®.[4] While ThinkParQ will take over customer support and sales, Fraunhofer ITWM will continue to drive the further development of the software. The focus will stay on improvements and new features for HPC systems and applications.

Due to the nature of BeeGFS being free of charge, it is unknown how many active installations there are. However, there are around 100 customers worldwide that use BeeGFS and are supported by Fraunhofer. Among those are academic users such as universities and research facilities[5] as well as for-profit companies in finance or the oil & gas industry.

Notable installations include several TOP500 computers such as Loewe-CSC[6] cluster at the Goethe University of Frankfurt, Germany (#22 on installation), the Vienna Scientific Cluster[7] at the University of Vienna, Austria (#56 on installation), and the Abel[8] cluster at the University of Oslo, Norway (#96 on installation).