[cdwg] OpenSFS Request for proposals

[Shipman, Galen M.]

OpenSFS and EOFS members and participants, 

In 2012 OpenSFS invested over $2 Million (US) in open source scalable file system technologies. We have made significant investments in maintaining the canonical Lustre tree, new feature development, and testing and development infrastructure. 

In continuing our mission of supporting the open scalable file system community OpenSFS will soon be releasing a request for proposals (RFP) for Lustre feature development, parallel file system tools, addressing Lustre technical debt, and new efforts in parallel file system development (incubators). 

Our goals for this RFP are to: 
1) Further the Lustre roadmap to meet the highest priority requirements defined by the community 
2) Develop production quality tools to ease administration and use of open source scalable file systems 
3) Address Lustre technical debt to improve the code base and documentation thereof 
4) Encourage new efforts in open source scalable file systems for high performance and data intensive computing to broaden the set of solutions available to the community 

This work will benefit the entire community and we encourage your participation! 

For those that may consider responding to the RFP, we encourage innovative ideas and strong proposals that address one or more areas of interest detailed in the RFP. OpenSFS may fund multiple proposals as part of this RFP and we encourage broad participation from the entire open source scalable file system development communities. 

For those that choose not to respond to the RFP but would be interested in making this effort a success and are willing to dedicate time to actively participate in this and subsequent RFPs, please join the OpenSFS technical working group (http://www.opensfs.org/get-involved/technical-working-group/) and indicate your interest in participating in the RFP review and management process to the TWG leads. 

Once the RFP is officially released, we would appreciate everyone's help in getting the word out and encouraging strong proposals from the community. 

Thanks, 

Galen Shipman