Exactly. This is the software delivery mechanism for the LHC experiments. It’s a read only globally distributed (sort of) POSIX filesystem.

We use it in ATLAS to deploy both tagged releases and nightly builds. These can be about 100GB in size each.

The releases are used for production jobs across the worldwide grid, while the nightlies are used as development targets for individual developers.

Sounds like a read-only version of AFS [1], which had a global namespace and was used for software distribution as well as data sharing/collaboration. If you narrow the use case to software distribution, I suppose read only is a reasonable trade off if it enables higher performance.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_File_System

The biggest thing is that it’s read-only[1] and aims for high performance massively distributed reads (millions of clients).

[1] Though for publishing files you have have many concurrent transactions open from different machines so long as they lock unique paths.

Erm, it's not even a read-write filesystem.

It appears to simply be a read-only POSIX-fs interface to Merkle-encapsulated bits distributed via http.

Ceph and Gluster are completely different animals.

It sounds more like IPFS