structure contains basic information about each file, such as where the data contained in the file is stored. The Lustre file system also uses inodes, but inodes on MDTs point to one or more OST objects associated with the file rather than to data blocks. These objects are implemented as files on the OSTs. When a client opens a file, the file open operation transfers a set of object identifiers and their layout from the MDS to the client, so that the client can directly interact with the OSS node where the object is stored. This allows the client to perform I/O in parallel across all of the OST objects in the file without further communication with the MDS. If only one OST object is associated with an MDT inode, that object contains all the data in the Lustre file. When more than one object is associated with a file, data in the file is "striped" in chunks in a round-robin manner across the OST objects similar to RAID 0 in chunks typically 1MB or larger. Striping a file over multiple OST objects provides significant performance benefits if there is a need for high bandwidth access to a single large file. When striping is used, the maximum file size is not limited by the size of a single target. Capacity and aggregate I/O bandwidth scale with the number of OSTs a file is striped over. Also, since the locking of each object is managed independently for each OST, adding more stripes (one per OST) scales the file I/O locking capacity of the file proportionately. Each file created in the filesystem may specify different layout parameters, such as the stripe count (number of OST objects making up that file), stripe size (unit of data stored on each OST before moving to the next), and OST selection, so that performance and capacity can be tuned optimally for each file. When many application threads are reading or writing to separate files in parallel, it is optimal to have a single stripe per file, since the application is providing its own parallelism. When there are many threads reading or writing a single large file concurrently, then it is optimal to have one stripe on each OST to maximize the performance and capacity of that file. In the Lustre 2.10 release, the ability to specify composite layouts was added to allow files to have different