What is the emote_user.dat file?

What are the differences and similarities between parallel file systems and  distributed file systems ? If possible what are (or can be) the use cases for "parallel distributed" or "distributed parallel" file systems?

• I am about to choose a MSc thesis topic, and due to the needs of my workplace, i decided to make a thesis on distributed file systems.. yet during my research i came across the terms "parallel file systems" and "distributed parallel file systems".. as i am doing my preliminary readings, it would be of great help to know the basics about these terms and their use cases.

• Answer:

  Each parallel file system is also distributed. Therefore a differentiation between "parallel" and "distributed parallel" does not make sense. You can make the case that parallel file systems are different from distributed file systems, e.g. this lecture at IIT (http://www.cs.iit.edu/~iraicu/teaching/CS595-F10/lecture07.pdf) uses such a definition. I would be very careful with this definition. Even the linked lecture acknowledges that the separation is a bit fuzzy. And it would be easy to find a different one. These terms are not used very carefully in industry and research. However, if the term "parallel" is used the chances are very high that it is somebody from the HPC/super computing community. I don't think that anybody outside that community uses the term.