The team behind cunoFS

About Us

cunoFS is the culmination of almost 100 developer-years of work that started in 2014, by a team of software engineers who have deep expertise in parallelization and threading, networking, and user-mode virtualization.

cunoFS is a product of PetaGene, a software company that was founded in 2016 and whose award-winning transparent compression and encryption products have been widely adopted by Pharma and other Heathcare and Life Sciences customers. PetaGene extended its transparent user-mode virtualisation read-back technology in 2018 to give high-throughput virtual file access to data in S3 and other flavours of object storage. The raw transfer speeds that PetaGene achieved at the time were 3x those of AWS CLI S3 commands, and when combined with PetaGene’s 10x lossless genomic compression, gave a throughput speed-up of up to 30x. This access method proved to be very popular, with customers and prospective customers using it to access all of their data stored in object storage, not just their compressed or genomic data.

So PetaGene decided to spin out cunoFS as a separate product, unrelated to genomic compression, but first made it faster and capable of high throughput for all kinds of workloads. PetaGene also made cunoFS fully POSIX-compatible, but without the need for any modifications to the objects in the object storage. cunoFS’s raw transfer speed is now 30x that of AWS CLI S3 for a single node, and has been benchmarked at 11 Tbps for 256 nodes. Many novel optimisations mean that cunoFS achieves high throughput and scalability for both large-file and small-file workloads, even when workflows involve random shuffling of data. cunoFS is thus a highly-convenient and intuitive tool for POSIX access to object storage, with many optimizations that provide high throughput in a wide variety of workflows and applications.

Management Team

Dan Greenfield, Co-Founder and CEO, PetaGene

A Cambridge University PhD with a Masters in Bioinformatics, Dan has experience leading teams in Silicon Valley to build groundbreaking new products. One of the teams he led was acquired by NVIDIA in 2006. His PhD was awarded a prize for the top dissertation in the UK by the British Computer Society.

Vaughan Wittorff, Co-Founder and CCO, PetaGene

A Cambridge University PhD, Vaughan has significant experience in inventing technology and commercializing it in the private sector. He was formerly a Senior Lecturer in Electrical Engineering at Curtin University of Technology, and long-term Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University in Computer Science and Technology.

PetaGene Customers Include