AWS Delivers High-Performance NFS Access With S3 Files
HPCwire, Thursday, April 9th, 2026
HPC sites that may have avoided Amazon's S3 object store as a data repository may want to take a second look now that it has launched S3 Files, a new offering that gives customers high-performance NFS-based file system access to their data stored in S3 buckets.
Object stores aren't traditionally used in HPC, as users typically demand read and write access to individual files, as opposed to accessing and changing entire objects. AWS's Amazon S3 prioritizes reliability and low cost, while HPC sites typically need very fast and low latency access to data, with price and reliability being secondary concerns. POSIX compliance is another factor for HPC sites, many of whom would rather not rewrite their existing Linux apps to use the GET, PUT, and DELETE semantics of S3's REST API.