On Making GPFS Truly General

GPFS (also called IBM Spectrum Scale) began as a research project that quickly found its groove supporting high performance computing (HPC) applications. Over the last 15 years, GPFS branched out to embrace general file-serving workloads while maintaining its original distributed design. This article gives a brief overview of the origins of numerous features that we and many others at IBM have implemented to make GPFS a truly general file system.