GPFS (General Parallel File System, brand name IBM Storage Scale and previously IBM Spectrum Scale) is high-performance clustered file system software developed by IBM. It can be deployed in shared-disk or shared-nothing distributed parallel modes, or a combination of these. It is used by many of the world's largest commercial companies, as well as some of the supercomputers on the Top 500 List. For example, it is the filesystem of the Summit at Oak Ridge National Laboratory which was the #1 fastest supercomputer in the world in the November 2019 TOP500 list of supercomputers. Summit is a 200 Petaflops system composed of more than 9,000 POWER9 processors and 27,000 NVIDIA Volta GPUs. The storage filesystem called Alpine has 250 PB of storage using Spectrum Scale on IBM ESS storage hardware, capable of approximately 2.5TB/s of sequential I/O and 2.2TB/s of random I/O.

Like typical cluster filesystems, GPFS provides concurrent high-speed file access to applications executing on multiple nodes of clusters. It can be used with AIX clusters, Linux clusters, on Microsoft Windows Server, or a heterogeneous cluster of AIX, Linux and Windows nodes running on x86, Power or IBM Z processor architectures. In addition to providing filesystem storage capabilities, it provides tools for management and administration of the GPFS cluster and allows for shared access to file systems from remote clusters.