Lustre is designed for parallel access to large files. It accomplishes this by using striping to distribute the contents of a large file across several disk arrays (OSTs) to enable fast parallel IO.

The standard recommendation from the Lustre developers is:

• Files smaller than 1GB should be left with the default striping (1)
• Between 1GB and 10GB a small stripe should be used (2)
• 10 to 100GB : use medium striping (2 to 4)
• Above 100GB: use maximum striping (-c -1)

Use only this last option with individual files that you know they will be above 100GB or with a highly parallelized access.