pNFS (also referred to as parallel NFS or NFS V4.1) is an extension to NFS v4 that provides support for direct parallel storage access. pNFS is designed to leverage the full performance and scalability aspects of a parallel file system while maintaining compatibility with the widely-used NFS file system. The standard is being driven as an open source project by leading storage vendors in an effort to meet next-generation storage challenges.

"pNFS will represent a huge step forward for the storage community", stated Larry Genovesi, CEO of Terascala. "pNFS will be an asset to the entire performance-driven arena and we're pleased to be able to work with the Open Grid Computing team to accelerate the efforts in stabilizing this important new piece of technology."

The two companies will be demonstrating pNFS, along with the latest RDMA drivers and system code efforts developed by Open Grid Computing on the Terascala RTS 1000 platform. The Terascala RTS 1000 is a storage appliance designed to deliver both high throughput and high capacity over either Ethernet or InfiniBand networks so applications are not limited by their ability to read, write and store data rapidly during job run time.

"The ability to leverage the stable Terascala platform as the basis for our development work has given us a tremendous advantage", stated Tom Tucker, CEO of Open Grid Computing. "Users are becoming limited in their ability to scale their application environments and need the high throughput and expansion abilities of a parallel file system. The development work we will demonstrate at SC08 will show how NFSRDMA and 10Gb transports make pNFS an exciting high performance alternative to proprietary distributed storage solutions."