Network file systems such as CIFS (SMB) on Windows or Network File System (NFS) on UNIX. Although network file systems are not designed for high-performance computing, they can work well for sequential file access.

Clustered file systems. Clustered file systems provide a group of nodes with high-bandwidth file access, as well as a unified namespace for files and directories. Clustered file system performance is similar to a direct-attached local file system.