Dear IO500 Community,

As you may remember, we announced in December that we would be initiating a search for a new committee member.  We are delighted to announce at this point that Andreas Dilger, a well-known architect and proponent of open-source software in High Performance Computing, has agreed to join our committee as a trial member in accordance with our committee membership rules. After careful consideration of several excellent nominees, the committee chose Andreas on the basis of his continued demonstrated involvement in the IO500.

Due to our awareness that this may cause concerns within the community,  we have discussed the general idea of adding a committee member who has a relationship with a vendor within our committee as well as with our external vendor advisory board. To address these concerns, we wish to make two facts known. One, our committee makes changes only with unanimous approval which we believe is sufficient to prevent any vendor bias. Additionally, we have created a new rule (rule #5) covering conflict of interest to specifically address this concern.

We look forward to working together with Andreas and with all of you in our community to continue improving IO500 and bringing value to the HPC storage world.

As always, please feel free at any time to email us with any questions, concerns, or suggestions.

Thank you very much,

The IO500 Committee