A wide variety of applications, particularly in High Performance Computing, relies on distributed environments to process and analyse large amounts of data. New infrastructures have emerged to support the execution of such computations, most of them involve distributed computing, parallelizing the computing process among the nodes of a large distributed computing platform. As the amount of data increases, the need to provide efficient, easy to use and reliable storage solutions has become one of the main issue for scientific computing. A well-tried solution to this issue is the use of Distributed File Systems (DFSs). In this paper we present and compare six modern DFSs that are today widely used to deal with the problem of storage capacities and data access, federating the resource of distributed platform.
