DeepSeek AI has made its Fire-Flyer Fire System (3FS) parallel file system fully open-source this week, as part of its Open Source Week event. The disruptive AI company from China brags that 3FS can hit 7.3 TB/s aggregate read throughput in its own server data clusters, where DeepSeek has been using 3FS to organize its servers since at least 2019.
3FS is a Linux-based parallel file system designed for use in AI-HPC operations, where many data storage servers are being constantly accessed by GPU nodes for training LLMs. 3FS is unique from other file systems thanks largely to its almost singular prioritization of random read speeds above all else, and almost completely ignoring read caching.
